Finally, he steps away and hurries to the back of the stage. I watch open-mouthed, surprised by this sudden change. He’d seemed fine before the speech. But now I’m left at the microphone, a hundred-odd students staring up at me expectantly, waiting for a profound, moving speech from the grieving mother. And as I stand here, all eyes on me, I find myself floundering, failing to find the words that would come easily to anyone else.
‘Thank you,’ I say, sweat forming on my brow as I speak. ‘This would mean a lot to Grace. She… she would…’ My mouth opens and closes, until Rita makes her way towards me.
‘Shall we light the candle now?’ she asks.
I nod, feeling as young and helpless as the teenagers before me. It isn’t often that this happens to me. In fact, I can’t remember a time I ever felt this way, helpless as a newborn baby, unable to form coherent sentences. Before Rita hands me the taper to light the candle, I find myself searching for Charles at the back of the stage, smiling sadly, because now I finally understand his difficulty in making the speech. Maybe Charles isn’t weak after all. But when I look behind me, I see that Charles is gone.
Rita ushers me down and directs me towards the symbolic candle. Someone places a flower in my hand, a lily, but when I search for the person who did it, they’re gone – a glimpse of dark hair and nothing more. Where is Charles? Why has he left me to face this alone?
The flame goes up with a whimper and one of Grace’s favourite songs begins to play: ‘Lego House’ by Ed Sheeran. I say thank you again, with what I hope is a gracious smile on my face, and then I make my excuses and leave. I find Charles slumped against a wall in the hallway leading back to the entrance. Three schoolgirls are staring at him through the window of a nearby classroom. The image of him burns on my retinas, seeps into my mind. Seeing him there strikes me as the most repulsive sight of my husband I’ve ever experienced, and shame washes over me from head to toe. It’s an unusual experience, this embarrassment, but his behaviour today has triggered it.
He stares at me, staggers to his feet, and begins to walk.
My legs shake as I make my way back to the car, but I can’t pinpoint why. Charles interprets my silence as anger, walking behind me with his head dropped low to his chest. The truth is, I don’t know what to make of Charles’s behaviour. His behaviour – the meltdown, swiftly followed by the disappearance – is odd, even given the trauma we’ve been through. My mother’s words echo through my mind, making me question my husband’s character once more.
But as I walk, I finger the object hidden in my bag.
Alicia’s mobile phone.
Eighteen
‘Grace, it’s Mum. I went to your school memorial today and now I’m home. Your dad decided to go to work this afternoon and I’ve reorganised the pantry, because when I stay still I miss you too much. But there was nothing else to do, after that, to stop me thinking about you, so now I’m sitting in the garden alone, allowing myself to miss you. It’s raining a bit – that drizzle you like, the kind that makes your hair all frizzy. It used to annoy me that you’d spend hours out in the drizzle and then complain about your hair. I used to think, well, don’t go out in the rain then. But I don’t think that anymore. Now, I simply want to enjoy it with you.
‘I took your friend’s phone today. You wouldn’t approve of that, I know. You were always such a good girl, but I can’t be that way anymore. I need to find out what happened to you.
‘I… I took your father’s planner, too.
‘Grace…’ My voice becomes a whisper. ‘Did he hurt you?’
Though I want to dive into Charles’s planner first, I decide to check Alicia’s phone immediately, because she might report it as stolen and it might have some sort of GPS location tracking for all I know. I’m not a complete idiot, but I’m hardly a tech-savvy hacker.
The drizzle wets my cheeks and hair and pools underneath me on the garden chair. It’s usually quiet in this corner of the world, but I’ve allowed the two black labs to have a run around the garden. They’re currently growling over a bone. Georgie drops it, runs away, comes back and attacks Porgie’s tail. Both of them bark happily. They’ve moved on so easily from Grace.
But I cannot let her go.
When I try to get into the phone, it becomes apparent that it’s password-protected. All phones are these days. I need either the four-digit PIN or a thumbprint. Well, the thumbprint is out, but I do know Alicia’s birthday. I type in 0103. Nothing. Then I try 2002, for her birth year. Nothing. I wonder whether there’s a limit to how many times I can try, or whether the phone is set up to photograph whoever is trying to guess the code. I’ve heard of that feature, too, after seeing many pictures of cats captured by laptop webcams as they step all over the keyboard.
Are you sneaky, Alicia? Would you choose a random combination of numbers? Or are you too arrogant to imagine that you would ever lose your phone? I tap in 1234 and the phone unlocks.
I can’t help but laugh. Sometimes it truly is the easiest solution. One thing I have heard about hackers is that they don’t require thousands of lines of complicated code to override a password. No. They have a list of passwords that they try with thousands of usernames and emails. The reason they hack you, is you.
There’s very little in her messages, but teenage girls don’t text anymore. I open WhatsApp to find a dozen or more groups, all set up with different members. Surely Grace is involved in at least a few of these. The first thread I open is about Grace.
Can’t believe she’s gone.
* * *
I keep seeing her last messages and crying.
* * *
Her dad is weird.
* * *
Remember what she said about him?
* * *
Yeh.
* * *
Fucked up.
My stomach sinks. What did she say about him? My mother’s words come back to me. There are rumours. I scroll further back but there aren’t any more messages about Charles. Instead, I begin to see Grace’s name pop into the conversation, and my heart lurches. She was in this group, posting up until the day she died.
Her last message.
See you at school, bitches.
I keep scrolling up and up and up. The messages are frequent. There are hundreds of them and most are complaints about schoolwork or schoolteachers.
And then…
Did you see Lily today? Lord, that girl is a mess.
Skanky AF.
I hope she dies.
I stare at that message for several minutes as the drizzle flecks my face. Next to that last message is my daughter’s name. The thought of those words coming from my daughter leaves me reeling. Is this what passes for bitchiness now? I know that I can’t allow my mind to run away with itself – I don’t know the full context surrounding these messages – but the thought of Grace wishing anyone dead is just… alien to me. How could she? My memories of Grace conjure up a kind and gentle human being. This, however, is completely the opposite.
When I’ve pulled myself back together, I take screenshots of all the mean and disturbing messages on Alicia’s WhatsApp. Then I check her Snapchat folder and smile to myself at the saved images and videos there. I fire off a few messages and send as much as I can to my own phone, and then I smash Alicia’s phone to pieces. After the dogs are done running around the garden, I hop back into the car, drive out of the village and throw the broken pieces out of the window onto the grass verge of a quiet road.
Alicia, you may be in for a surprise, sweetheart, because you’ve just sent several bitchy messages about half the members of the orchestra into your WhatsApp group for orchestra practice – by mistake, of course. What a shame those other students are about to find out just what a nasty creature you are.
* * *
On the drive back to the house, I want to relish in my admittedly rather insignificant victory. Alicia will finally be taken down a peg, which frankly couldn’t happen to a nicer girl. Most of the messages I sent to the orche
stra are screenshots of conversations between her and Ethan on WhatsApp and Snapchat, bitching about their mutual friends. There were other things that I didn’t send, because Grace would’ve disapproved of me doing so, though I must confess that I did keep them. I am now in possession of a handful of suggestive videos, all filmed while Ethan and Grace were supposedly still a couple. Before, according to Ethan, they’d decided to be just friends. That means Ethan was cheating on Grace with her best friend throughout most of their relationship. I’m not stupid enough to keep anything X-rated, because that would be breaking the law, but they are embarrassing enough that Alicia wouldn’t want them sent to her friends, which means I could possibly use them as blackmail, as well as proof of Alicia’s lies.
But none of the messages mentioned Grace being in a relationship with anyone else, and that is what holds me back from truly enjoying this victory. I’m no closer to finding out the identity of the father of her unborn child. Despite the Instagram message to Grace confirming Alicia’s unpleasant side, there was nothing implicating her in Grace’s death, either. But at the same time, I can’t stand Alicia’s duplicity and I have to admit that I remain suspicious of her.
As I get out of the car, back at home, I reach for my own phone to find another anonymous message. I’d been so lost in concentration that I hadn’t noticed. I hurry into the house, sit at the kitchen table and open the message, taking my time to process the words.
You have no idea who your daughter really was.
The drizzle becomes a downpour, battering against the window as I try to make sense of this latest message. It isn’t a threat, and it doesn’t appear to be attempting to scare me. A very different tone to the others. When I check the number of the first message, it doesn’t match. I immediately text back.
Tell me who she was.
Could this be Alicia? Has she already figured out that I stole her phone? I stop my thoughts from running away, determined to keep an open mind. These messages certainly have a different mood and, though I hate to admit it, I can’t help but wonder if the sender is correct, because the more I dig into Grace’s personal life, the more I come to understand that she was not the person I thought she was.
I hope she dies.
The daughter I’d thought was good and pure wrote that message about another human being. All these years I’ve been faking my morality in order to set an example, thinking that she would follow my lead. Grace always felt like the burning beacon of good in my life. Charles has his faults; he’s certainly not working for a charity. I’ve seen some of his business deals and they aren’t contributing to a better world. Then there’s me, and my own issues. But Grace was different. Wasn’t she?
After staring at the phone screen for a few minutes, I decide that the anonymous messenger probably isn’t going to text me back, so I move on to Charles’s planner. Perhaps there is something in here that will explain the video diary Grace posted about spending more time with him.
As I open up the diary to the day Grace died, I find myself recalling those first moments after Grace failed to come home from school. All my calls went straight to Charles’s voicemail, and later that night, he’d blamed meetings in Derby. But in his planner, there is simply one letter recorded on that date: ‘H’.
I flick through the pages and find several instances of this mysterious letter H. What on earth does it mean? Then I begin to notice another pattern. On every Thursday lunchtime, Charles has recorded ‘G to T’. What does it mean? G could very well be Grace, but what is T? Charles’s other notes aren’t written in the same manner. Most of them are filled with detail: Meeting at 5 p.m. in boardroom @ Derby office. Or, Appointment with property developer, Kings Cross, 2 p.m.
My instincts tell me that these abbreviated notes are different to his usual schedule. After living with this man for two decades, I must have a read of him by now. I must understand him, even if I don’t truly love him.
My phone vibrates. The anonymous messenger is back.
I can show you.
The next message is a link to a YouTube video. Surprised, I click on the link and it takes me through to Grace’s own channel. My body goes rigid as the video plays. This is a new video uploaded today. Grace is in the middle of the frame, standing outside Lady Margaret’s. I enlarge the video to fill my phone screen. The footage begins with laughter in the foreground, followed by my daughter’s voice. She’s right in the centre of the action.
‘Present for you, loser.’ Grace grins at the camera before turning to face a girl behind her. The girl is slumped over, her black hair obscuring her face. Grace pulls her upright, and there’s a brief glimpse of her pale, surprised face before Grace smashes a brown, squidgy substance all over her nose and mouth.
There’s laughter coming from whoever is filming the event. The black-haired girl reels back, scraping the stuff off her face and staring at it on her hands.
‘Is it…? Is it dog shit?’ the girl says in horror. Her face is pale and small, frightened and disgusted. No one answers her. The other students in the video, none of whom I recognise, continue to laugh, their flushed faces tipped back in hysterics. Eventually the girl runs away.
‘Fuck off then.’ Grace’s expression twists into a sneer that I have never, ever seen before.
I close my eyes.
My heart picks up tempo, fluttering in my chest like bird wings. I’ve never seen my only child like that, with a hard, cold sneer on her face, basking in the attention of others. That isn’t the Grace I knew—the innocent and pure girl I thought she was—which makes me wonder: How did I miss this darker side to my daughter?
* * *
Was Grace like me? Did I miss the signs? I had never, ever seen her display any sign of violence, from birth to death, until I watched that video.
There haven’t been many moments in my life where I can say I’ve been surprised. People, on the whole, prove themselves to be entirely predictable, however hard they try to hide their true nature. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to see through the artificial exterior and delve into the blood and guts beneath. Perhaps that’s the privilege of being detached from the rest of the world: we’re good judges of character and not often fooled by fakery. But we also seek out the easily manipulated, the weak characters on the edges of society. As a mother, I constantly worried that Grace was the kind of innocent who could be taken advantage of by someone like me. But now I worry the opposite. Now I worry she was like me. A sociopath.
After pulling myself together, I log into Grace’s YouTube channel, download the video onto my laptop and remove it from the internet. Whoever uploaded this knows her username and password, which means it’s someone she was close to. Alicia?
I force myself to watch the offending clip again, and this time I examine the smaller details. Grace was dressed in school uniform, which means it was taken before she went into sixth form. A-level students at Lady Margaret’s can wear their own clothes. Her hair is honey hued, and her face is rounder than it was when she died. That’s another concern of mine. It’s from viewing this old image of Grace that it hits me how much weight she lost. She became a picky eater who went through fads week by week. There was vegetarian week, vegan week, organic week, keto week. Why didn’t I see that Grace wanted to lose weight in order to fit in with the other girls at school?
What else do I notice? The dog poo might not be dog poo. Could it be chocolate mousse? I try to believe that it is. The laughter of the person filming the event sounds familiar, but I’m not sure if I’m willing it to be Alicia because of everything else that has happened. Could it be Sasha? I’m not sure. These kinds of videos can spread through a school like wildfire, meaning that the person who filmed it might not be the same person who uploaded it to YouTube.
I estimate that this video was taken when Grace was about fifteen years old, not long before her GCSEs. Fifteen is old enough to understand the consequences of bullying. Unless she didn’t care about the consequences, like someone with antisocial personality
disorder.
As I close the laptop, I run through what that could mean. According to Angela, most sociopaths see their lack of conscience as a gift, because it allows them to manipulate and hurt others. They can wield their power over other people as part of a sick game of cat and mouse. You don’t meet many sociopaths who go to a therapist. I’m in the minority there, and I accept that my dysfunctional conscience is a weakness.
And yet sociopaths are high risk for suicide. It’s all part of the game. A bored sociopath might kill him or herself in order to get back at a partner, for instance. Back a sociopath up against the wall and they will lash out in the manner that will hurt you the most, even if that means hurting themselves.
When I was in that situation I did the same thing. Thirteen years old and morally bankrupt already, with the world judging me for what I’d done to Annie Robertson and the others. The world against me. A life taken. As I sit there remembering what it was like, I run my fingers along the scars on my forearms. When I was pressing the blade into my wrists, I was thinking about how I’d be getting back at my mother, and Annie, and everyone else in the world. I hadn’t been thinking about how I was lonely or depressed or that I wanted to die.
Only Daughter: An gripping and emotional psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist Page 12