Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  I feel Sylvie’s cool touch on my skin. She puts her hands over my hands.

  “You’re hiding. Don’t hide, Grace. Don’t hide away,” she says.

  She peels my hands from my face. She isn’t trembling anymore. Now she seems much calmer than me.

  “Sorry, sweetheart.”

  I think how much I love her. I take her hands in mine.

  There’s a smell of smoke now, and a sense of movement out there on the landing, a sense of an alien presence, something alive yet not alive. I think, What kills you in a fire? I’ve heard it’s the smoke that gets you, not the flame, that you choke before the fire can reach you, the thick smoke blotting up your breath. There’s a scream of protest in my head. Not now. Not like this. Please God. Don’t let it happen like this.

  “I don’t like it here,” says Sylvie.

  “No, sweetheart.”

  You can hear its sounds quite distinctly now, the crackle and hiss of it, moving close to our door. The sour smoke catches in my throat.

  Sylvie’s forehead is creased in a frown, as though something puzzles her.

  “So why don’t we go, Grace?”

  My eyes fill up at her innocence, at her child’s view of the world, the way it seems so simple to her.

  “Let’s go,” she says again.

  Helplessness washes through me, an overwhelming despair.

  “I can’t get out. I don’t know how. I can’t get out,” I tell her.

  “Can’t you, Grace?”

  Still that little troubled frown.

  “No, sweetheart. The door’s locked.”

  I get up, go to it—going through the motions—rattle the handle. It doesn’t budge. The fire is raging so near to us now, I can feel the heat that sears through the gap between the door and the frame. It’s so hot I pull my hand away. The paint on the wood is blistering.

  I go to the windows. There are window locks. Well, of course there would be. He’s thorough, he thinks of everything, the house would be secure. I look in all the locks, but there’s no sign of the key to them. But even if I could open the window, it wouldn’t do us any good. There’s a long drop onto paving stones.

  Sylvie comes to stand beside me at the window.

  “We could get out onto the sill,” she says. “And onto the roof of the music room.”

  “The music room?”

  “It’s just round the corner,” she says.

  I kneel down, put my hands on her shoulders. I shall humor her and play along, wanting to keep her mind occupied. Anything to protect her from the fear I feel.

  “How would we get off the music-room roof?” I ask her.

  “We could climb down the creeper,” she tells me. Her voice is calm and matter-of-fact. “You’d have to jump at the bottom. You don’t mind jumping, do you, Grace?”

  She reaches out and cups my face in her hands. It’s what I do when I’m trying to make her listen; it’s an adult gesture, somehow, as though she is the woman and I am the child. Her eyes are very close to mine. I see how blue they are, that remote, pale, perfect color of a frosty winter sky.

  My heart tilts. The scene at the quarry seems to unscroll again in front of me, the bracelet in the evidence bag, the dragon charm that glittered in the sun. I think how I have doubted her. Never really trusted her, never asked for her help. Never let her change me.

  “No, sweetheart. I don’t mind jumping,” I tell her. “But, Sylvie, look—you’ll have to be the leader. You’re going to have to tell me what to do.”

  We look out the window together. I notice a narrow brick ledge about eighteen inches below the sill. It runs on past the window and around the corner of the house. It looks like it’s just for decoration—it’s scarcely as wide as one of my feet, and the brickwork has a crumbly look.

  “You’ll have to be very careful,” she tells me. “You’ll have to hold on tight. But it’s not very far to the corner.”

  “I’ll have to smash the window,” I tell her.

  I look around the room, hunting for something heavy. There’s a lamp with a solid ceramic base. I rip the plug from the wall.

  I don’t know whether to hit or to throw. I grab one of Marcus’s shirts and wrap it around my hand.

  “Sylvie. Stay right on the other side of the room. You must keep your back to the window and cover your eyes with your hands. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, Grace.”

  She’s covering her eyes, but she can’t resist turning her head and looking out through her fingers.

  “Really cover them,” I tell her.

  You can hear all the sounds of the fire now—its roar and crackle and seethe. There’s a sudden rush: it must have caught some fabric on the landing, perhaps the velvet curtains. I didn’t know before how noisy fire could be. Pale curls of smoke sneak in through the hinge of the door.

  I turn my head away, close my eyes. I punch at the glass with the lamp base.

  The sound of breaking is shockingly loud. It echoes, it seems to go on forever, the fractured fragments splintering on the floor.

  Wherever he is, he must have heard. I listen, but there are no footsteps. Perhaps he couldn’t reach us now; perhaps the fire is burning too fiercely on the landing. Then I hear the sound of car tires screeching away down the drive.

  I pick out the bits of broken glass that stick up from the base of the window, making a gap we can climb through. My arm is cut, thick drops of bright blood dripping on the floor. It looks dramatic, but it doesn’t hurt me.

  “Sylvie, you’ll have to help me. I don’t know how to do this.”

  “No worries, Grace.” She smiles; she’s pleased with this rather grown-up phrase. I think of the magician at Karen’s Halloween party, when he flourished his cloak and the rabbit appeared in Sylvie’s lap. No worries.

  I start to climb out through the gap in the glass.

  “No, I’ll be first,” she says. “I’ll show you.”

  I bite back the urge to stop her.

  She takes a chair, climbs up on it, clambers out onto the ledge. She slides along with tiny steps, leaning her body into the wall, always keeping the same foot in front. She finds handholds in the window frame and where a drainpipe comes down.

  “See, Grace? I’m an acrobat . . .”

  She edges her way along as far as the corner.

  “Now,” she calls over her shoulder to me.

  I climb out. There’s a shrill, sharp sound in my ears, a mosquito whine of vertigo. I’m acutely aware of the void beneath me, all that vast space of white air. There’s some ornamental brickwork just above my head. I cling to it with my fingers. My chest hurts because I am holding my breath.

  “Don’t look down, Grace,” she tells me.

  She disappears around the corner.

  I creep along the ledge, shuffling along with my right foot always in front of my left. I don’t dare to take a proper step. I reach for the drainpipe as Sylvie did. I can feel how flimsy it is. I press my body into the wall. I make myself breathe. I count my breaths.

  Around the corner, the flat asphalt roof of the music room is just below the level of the ledge. Creeper grows over the edge of it. With a rush of relief I step down onto the roof. The tips of my fingers are grazed and stinging where they clung to the brickwork.

  The roof is about three yards across. There’s grass below us; here, the lawn comes right up to the wall. Sylvie goes to the edge of the roof, then turns and slides over it on her stomach, holding on to the branches of the creeper with her hands.

  “You do it like this,” she tells me.

  I go to join her, slither over the edge as she did. I watch her scramble down the creeper. A little way down, where there’s just one stem and no branches, she jumps and lands on the lawn.

  I find a foothold in the creeper, ease my weight onto my foot. But I’m heavier than Sylvie, and there’s a high-pitched creak like a voice crying out. I shift my weight to my other foot, and the creeper starts to tear. I feel it shear away beneath me. I grab at ano
ther branch, but that too comes away in my hand. I fall on the grass with some of the creeper on top of me, and a dust of cement and crumbled brick that the creeper has ripped from the wall.

  “Are you all right, Grace?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I tell her.

  She comes to me, and I hold her close.

  “There. We did it,” I say.

  Blood from the cut in my arm drips on her.

  “Your poor arm,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. Though now it’s really hurting me—as if, now that we’re almost in safety, I can allow myself the distraction of it, can let myself feel the pain. And with the pain the fear returns—my fear for Gemma, and all the desperate questions about what Marcus has done.

  I sit there for a moment. I breathe in deeply, drawing in great gulps of air.

  “Sweetheart. We have to find her . . . We have to find Lennie.”

  It still unnerves me, calling her that.

  “Yes. Where is she, Grace?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  The blood from my arm drips on the grass. I watch the vivid pool of red that soaks through the soil so quickly. How rapidly—casually, almost—your blood can seep away.

  “What shall we do, then?” she says.

  “Sylvie, listen. When you talked to me about Coldharbour—you sometimes said, ‘I had a cave and a dragon.’ D’you remember?”

  “Yes, Grace.”

  “Sweetheart, can you tell me about the cave?”

  Anxiety clouds her face.

  “We weren’t meant to go there, we weren’t allowed to go. We got scolded, we were naughty girls for going there.”

  There’s some other person’s inflection in her voice. It troubles me—it’s like a stranger speaking through my child. I push away the sense of disquiet I feel.

  “No one will scold you now. You can tell me about it,” I say.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  A panic like nausea surges through me.

  “Please, Sylvie. It might be important.”

  But her face is blank and closed.

  “Sylvie, just try for me.” Fear has its claws in me, but I keep my voice quite ordinary so as not to alarm her. “Try and think about the cave . . . It’s for Lennie, to help her,” I say.

  She closes her eyes; screws up her face, as though she’s struggling to conjure some scene in her mind.

  “Sylvie. The cave. Anything you remember. Please tell me . . .”

  A shadow crosses her face.

  “It’s cold, Grace.” Her voice is quiet and serious. “It’s very dark and secret.”

  I shudder when she says this—it sounds like a tomb. I’m so afraid for Gemma, I’m sure that Gemma is dead.

  “Can you show me where it is?” I ask her.

  She turns and leads off, walking vaguely over the lawn. I follow just behind her.

  I glance back. There’s a red, unnatural glare at the first-floor windows: the fire is spreading. There’s a sound like a small explosion, one of the windowpanes shattering. Yellowish wisps of smoke coil upward, and scraps of paper, charred and sooty, hover like little black birds.

  She moves across the grass, past the skimmed-milk pools of narcissi. She hesitates. A pigeon flies off through the horse chestnut tree and she pauses, watching its flight. She seems uncertain, distracted. It’s clear that she doesn’t know where to go, that she has no memory to guide her. I’ve done the wrong thing again. I shouldn’t have wasted time asking her. I’m just about to catch up with her and grab her and run to get help.

  But suddenly her step quickens. Past a great weeping willow she turns to her right, where there’s a tangled shrubbery of rhododendron bushes. She moves with a sudden certainty. She pushes in under the rhododendrons. I follow. Some of them are such huge old things, with the lowest branches growing out high on the stem, she can almost walk beneath them without bending. Then we come to younger, denser bushes. She crawls on hands and knees. I crawl behind her. Some of the branches are broken, the red blooms spilt and scattered. The torn-off petals still have their color—it must have happened recently. Someone has pushed through here before us.

  Abruptly, we come to a clearing: a mound of earth, a door. It looks like some old storage place or icehouse.

  “It’s here, Grace.”

  The door has no lock; it’s held in place with wire wrapped around the latch. My heart pounds. I untwist the wire.

  Inside, it’s completely dark. A cold, damp smell of trapped air fills my mouth, my nose. Instinctively I take a step back.

  “Sylvie—I want you to stay out here, okay? Just stay out here and wait for me.”

  It’s like she doesn’t hear.

  She pushes past me.

  I follow her. Inside there are stairs going down.

  We’ve taken only a few steps down when the door swings shut with a soft, dull thud behind us. With no light from the doorway, the blackness is impenetrable. There’s a close, sour, heavy smell of earth. The walls, the dark, press in on us. It’s like being buried alive.

  I edge my way back to the door, feeling the steps with my foot. I’m half afraid that I won’t be able to open it from inside, but I manage to make it move a bit, and I prop it ajar with a stone.

  “Sylvie, wait for me.”

  But she’s gone on down into the dark.

  “Grace!”

  Her voice sounds high and distant, a thin little thread that’s swallowed up by the silence.

  I feel my way carefully down the steps as my eyes adjust to the dark. I come to a tiny shadowed room, airless, low-ceilinged. The walls are shiny with slow drops of oozing water.

  “Oh God.”

  I stare at the body in the corner. Just for an instant I think it’s a heap of clothes flung down. Her dress has a sheeny glimmer in the thin, faint light that filters down the stairway. I can make out the shape of her body. She’s sprawled out awkwardly, as though her limbs are fixed at the wrong angles. She’s lying on her side, and I can’t see her face, just the back of her head and her long dark fall of hair.

  I don’t know what he’s done to her. For a moment I recoil from knowing. I think of the utter callousness with which he’s killed before.

  But Sylvie doesn’t hesitate. She runs to her, kneels beside her, cradling Gemma’s head in her arms.

  I go to them. I roll Gemma onto her back. Her body is resistant, and heavy as something drenched. There’s an inky fingerprinting of bruises all across her face. Her eyes stay shut. She’s silent.

  “Grace.” There’s fear in Sylvie’s voice. “Is she all right, Grace?”

  I bend my face to Gemma’s, hold my ear to her mouth.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. But I think she’s breathing . . .”

  Sylvie nods a little.

  For both of us it’s the sweetest sound, that fragile, faltering breath.

  55

  THE HOSPITAL IS in Barrowmore, just up the hill from Deirdre’s house. We walk down a bland gray corridor, through harsh smells of disinfectant. The morning sun throws exact white squares on the floor.

  “I hate hospitals,” I tell Adam.

  “Me too,” he says. “They make me think of being six and having my tonsils taken out. I ate quite implausible quantities of raspberry ripple ice cream. But I still hated it.”

  The corridor passes the children’s ward. There’s a rain forest mural, a box of well-worn toys. Sylvie walks close to the wall, trailing her finger across the painted animals.

  “Adam! Grace!”

  Brian is hurrying down the passage toward us. We’d hoped to meet him earlier, but we’re later than we’d planned, as breakfast was slow this morning, with no sign of Brigid.

  Brian’s smile lights up his face.

  “You’re okay, Grace? You’ve recovered, you and Sylvie?”

  “Yes, we’re fine,” I tell him.

  “I’ve just been to talk to Gemma,” he says, “to bring her up to date. She’s got a bit of a bruised look, but the
y’re really pleased with her progress.”

  I grasp his wrist.

  “And you’ve got Marcus? Please, please, tell us you’ve caught him.”

  “I’m sorry, Grace.” He screws up his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste. “Marcus seems to have got away. We warned the airports, of course, but we think he’s left the country.”

  “No.” I can’t bear the injustice of this.

  Sylvie tugs at my hand. “Grace. Can we go now?”

  “Very soon, sweetheart. Perhaps you could play for a bit?”

  She goes to look in the toy box, but reluctantly.

  “So tell us,” I say to Brian. “Tell us what you’ve found out.”

  A woman is wheeled toward us on a stretcher. She’s on a drip, and her face is stretched and gray. Brian waits for her to pass. Curiosity gnaws at me.

  Brian turns toward us. “No answers yet,” he tells us. “But we’re working on it. The forensic accountants are coming down from Dublin. They’ll be trying to trace the movement of money between his accounts.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  It’s not what I was expecting, this talk of banks and accountants.

  “We won’t know the full story for quite some time,” says Brian. “But there was plainly a lot that Marcus wanted to hide.”

  “How can you tell that?” I ask him.

  “He left before he’d destroyed all his paperwork,” Brian tells me. “I guess you interrupted him—he probably thought that someone might come looking for you. We found some documents at the house. There’s a lot of stuff to work through, but we do know already that Marcus has several offshore accounts and there’s far too much money in them.”

  I think of Marcus’s perfect manners, his patrician air. It’s still so hard to make sense of.

  “It seems likely that the gallery and the shop were just a front—that he used them for money laundering,” says Brian.

  I picture the stylish shop with the vanilla scalloped blinds. Nothing is as I’d thought it was.

  “Alice was a clever woman. Good with figures,” he says. “Perhaps she’d asked a question that concerned him. Maybe something she said in all innocence. But perhaps he thought that in time she might start to suspect him. That could have been why he killed her.”