Only Daughter: An gripping and emotional psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist

by Sarah A. Denzil

  He’s not going to kill Grace’s boyfriend – not if I have anything to do about it. If that mousy-haired man-child had anything to do with her death, I will get there first. Because I can do it without remorse. It won’t be the first time I’ve watched the life fade from somebody’s eyes.

  * * *

  What no one understands is that Grace was the one who kept me sane, who kept me good, because I’m merely pretending to be an upstanding member of society. I take my bins out on time, I smile at people walking their dogs and I follow the Highway Code, but the real reason I do these things is to fit in without drawing attention to myself.

  I have antisocial personality disorder, diagnosed during my troubled and violent teenage years.

  The reason I’ve behaved myself for all this time is Grace, because I wanted my daughter to be raised by good people who loved her. I had to learn how to be a good wife and mother. Now that she’s gone, I don’t have to worry about any of that anymore. And where does that leave me? Do I quit my therapy sessions? Do I stop trying to be good? Here are my claws, retracted and blunt from lack of use, waiting for me to make a decision.

  Grace was not suicidal. She didn’t have any darkness in her; she was bright and happy. But maybe her pregnancy had something to do with her death? If I’m going to figure this out, I need to be open to all possibilities. Not only did she suffer at the bottom of that quarry, her fingernails clawing the muddy ground, but there was a life slowly dying inside her. What size was Grace when I was two months pregnant? The size of a bean, I remember them saying.

  Why didn’t she tell me she was having sex?

  Charles falls asleep on the sofa, the whisky finally catching up with him, and I slip away up the stairs to Grace’s room. I should be calling people – Grace’s friends, Charles’s aunt, my lunch friends. The truth is, there are painfully few people to call, and I want to focus on getting some answers first.

  That smell hits me again as I open the door. She used special purple-coloured shampoo to lighten her blonde hair and that’s the scent I first notice. I walk straight into the bathroom, open the bottle and inhale. It’s like she’s in the room with me. Lavender and patchouli. A laugh, a hair flick, a sing-song voice mocking my outfit.

  This is the first time I’ve been in her bathroom for months, and I’m rather in awe of being here. I’m not a prying mother. I’ve always given Grace her personal space, partly because that is what a good person would do, and partly, after seeing the way my own mother snooped through my belongings, because I didn’t want to subject Grace to the same treatment. But maybe I should have snooped? Maybe that would’ve kept her alive.

  I open the cabinet on the wall, crammed full of face masks and body lotions. After every sleepover Grace attends, she always comes back with more. I have a hunt through the mess but there’s nothing of interest in here. Grace will never go to a sleepover again, never have fun, laugh, cry. It takes all my self-control not to smash the mirror on the cabinet door.

  There’s nothing in the bathroom that will help me. No pregnancy tests or birth control items. I’d understood that Lady Margaret’s was a school with a decent sex-education programme. Charles and I were far too squeamish to bring up the subject at home. There’s another big strike against our parenting skills. My mother’s cutting words ring in my mind. Did I cause this? Is it all my fault?

  I’m lightheaded as I make my way back into Grace’s room, throbbing pain radiating from my temples. But I’ve come to appreciate it. Why shouldn’t I be hurting when Grace is cold, blue and missing her fingernail? I don’t want to feel anything other than pain and anger, because that’s what I deserve for failing her.

  I’m tempted to crawl onto her bed and sleep, but I force myself to search for clues, starting with the boyfriend, Ethan. What happened there? Is he the father? Who else could it be? Does he know about the pregnancy? Did she? You hear stories of teenage girls giving birth in the school toilets because they didn’t understand their bodies enough to recognise the signs.

  There are too many unanswered questions and I’m not sure where to find the answers I need.

  Grace’s laptop is on the desk, still plugged in and charging from yesterday. Charles doesn’t like it when Grace leaves things charging in her room; he doesn’t trust electronics not to burst into flame. I unplug it and then sink into the bed, pulling the laptop onto my knees. It smells even more like Grace here: the patchouli mixed with the tang of her sweat. One day these sheets will stop smelling like her and then nothing will smell like her again.

  The laptop boots up, but it’s password-protected. Grace loves the dogs, so I type in Georgie, then Porgie, then georgieporgie. None work. Next I try Georgiep0rgie – and I’m in. If there’s one thing I know about my daughter, it’s that she could while away hours on this machine. Often I’d walk into the family room and find her curled up on the sofa with headphones on, watching another YouTube star shouting at the camera. None of it made sense to me, but Grace would giggle away. She even started her own YouTube channel, which is where I start. I want to hear her voice.

  ‘Hi, everyone. So, today I want to show you my super quick-and-easy guide for playing “Shake It Off” on the violin…’

  It takes my breath away, seeing her moving, talking, being. Her hair is more honey than white here, imitating my own shade of blonde. This is her most viewed video, filmed before she started transitioning into the platinum locks sported by her friends at Lady Margaret’s.

  I pause the video to steady myself, but as I do, the image of her blue lips jumps into my mind. Every memory is tainted by the sight of her dead body. My abdomen aches from missing her, the pain starting to overtake my headache. God, I long for this day to be over, for it to be a cataclysmic glitch in the overarching plan of life. This is all a terrible mistake. Grace didn’t die. The universe fucked up. Here she is, alive and well, ready to yell at me for snooping around on her laptop.

  I press play. There’s an awkward silence as she lifts the bow, ready to play her first notes. Then the sound of her violin fills the room, slow and deep and beautiful. Listening to it makes me want to hear her perform the classical pieces she often rehearsed before orchestra practice. Those were the ones that haunted the house, seeping into every room and making it warmer than before. Those are the pieces I hope to dream about when I finally rid my memory of her blue lips.

  Grace.

  Instead, I’ll probably dream of her in the hospital. Another dead body in my nightmares.

  I pull my thoughts away before they spiral out of control and force myself to concentrate. There are many videos to choose from on her channel, which is much more popular than I’d realised while Grace was alive. Not all of them are about the violin; some were filmed with a GoPro as she took the dogs for a walk, running through the meadows at the back of the house. There are other excitable girls in her videos, all of whom I recognise from parties, shopping trips, sleepovers and outside the school gates. There’s Alicia, picking daisies and placing them in Grace’s hair. She’s silver-haired and beautiful, tall and slim enough to wear a crop top and leggings. Then there’s Sasha, another violinist from the school orchestra, with olive skin and curly dark hair – a quiet girl who played duets with Grace. I begin to make notes. What was it that DS Slater said in the waiting room? Teenagers are under a lot of pressure from exams and personal relationships. Could one of these people have contributed to Grace’s death?

  Ethan, however, does not feature on the YouTube channel, and I deliberate why. Perhaps he’s the odd kind of teenager who eschews social media, preferring to be incognito. I should try her Instagram or Facebook account to see if he pops up there.

  But for some reason, she doesn’t have autofill set up for Instagram or Facebook. I try her YouTube password but that doesn’t work, so I get up from the bed, move over to her desk, and begin to go through her drawers, trying to remember if Grace had a place she kept her passwords. I know there was a notebook she often wrote in, but was it where she kept a pass
word log?

  And why wouldn’t my tech-savvy teenage daughter, who used to set up our gadgets, not have autofill installed on her web browser? That in itself is odd. Who did she think would log on to her computer? Was she deliberately hiding information from me?

  It’s as I’m rifling through Grace’s drawers that it hits me. I don’t know where Grace’s phone is. The police never mentioned her phone during the interview. They haven’t released her belongings yet, but they showed us the alleged suicide note. Why wouldn’t they tell us if her phone had been recovered? And why wouldn’t they check her messages? Did they check it and find nothing relevant? Or was the phone not found at all? There is no way that Grace would ever leave the house without her phone. That’s my next step. I need to find that phone.

  Six

  At home, the condolence calls have started coming through, but where I am now is silent and still. There’s no chair – only a table, where a cold, lifeless body lies. Just me and her. Moving slowly, so as not to interrupt the quiet, I reach out and push Grace’s blonde hair away from her face, wishing that she hadn’t dyed it such a bright platinum. I miss the honey highlights and the brown lowlights. I miss the way she once resembled me as a teen, with blue eyes that held a warmth, like seas in hot countries. But the platinum colour bleached away all the highlights and lowlights and somehow changed the colour of her eyes.

  Now that Grace has been through the post-mortem, the blue tinge of her skin has been airbrushed away by the funeral home, but I still can’t stop thinking about that day in the morgue when Charles and I identified her body. I stroke my fingertips against hers; the dirt is gone and her nails are bare.

  I called DS Slater as soon as I realised that Grace’s phone was missing. They had an update for me, too. The coroner’s office had decided not to investigate following the post-mortem. Grace’s injuries were consistent with her fall and there was no sign of a struggle. DS Slater promised me, earnestly, that he had personally spent the last few days checking the quarry, examining CCTV from the few cameras in Ash Dale and asking around to find out if Grace had been alone. He told me that no one had seen Grace with anyone else. He believes she acted alone. He believes that Grace threw herself from the top of Stonecliffe Quarry, the Suicide Spot. She then bounced against the jagged rock edge, broke her leg, punctured the skin and bled to death as she desperately tried to drag herself back up the steps carved out of the stone with one of her wrists broken. The suicide note survived, tucked away in her pocket. Inside her school bag there were exercise books, a pencil case, a make-up bag and a purse. There was no sign of her mobile phone.

  ‘She would’ve had her phone,’ I’d insisted.

  ‘I agree,’ he’d replied, again with that soothing, calm tone, ‘because I don’t know of any seventeen-year-old who leaves the house without a phone. But there are many possible explanations. She might have lost it. Has she ever lost her phone before?’

  ‘Well, once,’ I’d admitted.

  ‘That could be it.’

  But I’d hung up unconvinced.

  Now that the investigation is over, we can arrange the funeral. But the thought of burying her… As I grip the edge of the cold metal table, fingertips a centimetre from Grace’s left shoulder, I can’t imagine watching her arrive at the house in a hearse.

  The condolence calls began this morning because Grace’s death has been reported by the news: Missing teenager Grace Cavanaugh has been found dead. Police are not treating her death as suspicious.

  No, there’s nothing suspicious about Grace’s death, I think bitterly. She was a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl. She was a promising violin player, working towards her A levels. Her father is a businessman – rich, busy, high-powered. Everything about Grace, on paper, points to a life of high stress, high pressure. But no one knew her like I did.

  If she weren’t dead on this table, she would be clinging to my side, arm looped in mine. Grace was the opposite of me, needy and empathetic, often demanding more of me than I thought it possible to give. She stretched me to my limits in terms of affection and love, and yet the more she demanded, the more I found within myself.

  Grace wasn’t highly strung, she was relaxed and well-adjusted. There was a learning curve when she first started secondary school, but she eventually became popular because she had an easy way with people, not just because she was pretty and clever. I watched her, I saw her with her friends and I knew her.

  ‘But you were pregnant.’ The part that doesn’t fit in my picture of Grace. ‘You didn’t tell me. I was right there, Grace, right under your nose, and you didn’t tell me what had happened to you. How did it happen? Did you make a mistake? Did someone hurt you?’ For all I know, this Ethan isn’t even the father. But I can’t allow my mind to spin out of control with conspiracy theories. Grace had a boyfriend, they both decided to take the next step and they made a mistake. It’s a familiar tale told around family dinner tables across the world. Mum, Mom, Ma, Mama, I’m pregnant.

  But not for me. You never let me in.

  ‘Did I ever really know you, Grace?’ As I speak, my jaw aches and my fingers are sore, all from the tension in my body, from gripping the table, from clenching my teeth together.

  And did she ever know me?

  When Grace rejected me after her birth, I thought it was because she sensed who I was. Perhaps it emanated from me like a pheromone, detected only by animals and babies.

  There are seven billion people in the world, all connected in some way. We’re related to each other, we love one another, we irritate each other, we say hello on the street and recognise faces from our local shop, we hold hands, we fight, we eat together, we drink, we give each other gifts at Christmas, we throw parties for colleagues and celebrate the birth of a new baby. But is this picture of the world as one big happy family nothing more than a fantasy? Is this the tale we tell ourselves at night? We understand that wars and serial killers exist, but we also tell ourselves that world peace is possible. What we don’t understand is that four per cent of those seven billion people don’t care about anyone else but themselves. They are sociopaths, and they can live however they like because they lack a conscience. They aren’t connected to anyone else on this earth. They don’t love, and they only give you a gift at Christmas because they want to play pretend.

  When I was thirteen years old, I saw several child psychologists because of my behaviour, and one of them suggested that I suffered from antisocial personality disorder. A sociopath. I believed I was part of that remorseless four per cent until Grace came along and I began to feel what I thought was love.

  My relationship with newborn Grace didn’t form right away. I didn’t have an epiphany while watching a tiny fuzzy jelly bean on a screen. My ice-cold interior didn’t melt the first time I heard her heartbeat inside me, and I didn’t cry tears of joy when I felt her kick from within. For the majority of my pregnancy, Grace was a means to securing a better future. She was my ticket out of hell.

  I don’t believe that a mother’s love is strong enough to destroy the effects of sociopathy with one magical unicorn horn to the heart. There are far too many bad mothers in the world to suggest that. However, the way I came to feel about my daughter can only be described as unconditional love. No one was more shocked than I was. But her existence made me want to love. For the first time, I wanted to love her like non-sociopaths love their children. I even sought professional help, and together with my therapist, I discovered that I could love and nurture her. I’d assumed, because of what I am, that I wouldn’t be able to.

  Because of Grace, I learned to live in this society without leaving oily footprints wherever I stepped. At first I wasn’t sure how to be a good force in the world. At the age of twenty-two, after living for several years without caring about anyone else, I had to learn what it is that makes someone good. It was at this time that I decided to adopt the ‘fake it till you make it’ philosophy to life. If I could pretend to be a good person every single day, then maybe one day
I’d wake up and I truly would be a good person.

  ‘I’m sorry, Grace,’ I whisper to her. ‘I can’t be good anymore.’

  I’m too tired to be good. Now, all I can do is run with anger towards whoever hurt my daughter. My grief started out uncertain and unformed, but I’ve twisted it into an arrow with a purpose. That arrow points to a problem I must solve: who murdered my daughter?

  Seven

  There are flowers on our doorstep. White lilies. Once again, I think of how Grace loved colour: pinks, purples, reds and yellows. All of this white and all of this blue. I will hate white lilies until the day I die.

  ‘White lilies would be perfect for the service, don’t you think?’ Charles says. ‘Who are they from?’

  I search the bouquet for a card. ‘I guess the florist forgot to attach the card. I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe there’s one inside,’ he replies.

  Sure enough, there is a pile of envelopes on the doormat, each containing a card of condolence, most featuring lily photography on the front. We make our way through them at the kitchen table, a bottle of whisky in the centre.

  ‘I still can’t accept it, Kat,’ Charles says, wiping away tears and standing the cards up in a gaudy display that curdles my stomach. ‘She was too young. She shouldn’t have ever, ever wanted to take her own life. Why didn’t we see it?’

  I pause, remaining cautious. Charles has already dismissed my convictions that Grace was not suicidal. He believes and trusts the police, accepting their ruling of suicide without so much as a second thought. If I continue to push my beliefs, he might actively try to stop my own investigations.

  ‘She hid it from us,’ I say. ‘If she knew, she chose not to tell us she was pregnant, and with A levels and everything else, maybe it was too much for her to cope with. What if she thought she’d let us down?’ All of those things are true, and yet I don’t believe for one minute that Grace would kill herself over any of them. She would have been nervous – afraid, even – to tell us about the baby, but to take her own life? No, I won’t accept it.