I thought it would be really hard but it was easy. After just a few minutes searching online, I found a map of London murders organised by year. I had vaguely thought that there would be hundreds or thousands of murders to comb through, but so far this year, nearly six months in, there had only been sixty-two.
The statistics were searchable through different categories: age, type of weapon, gender of victim. I clicked on the box marked ‘female’ and the number dropped to thirteen. Thirteen? Out of a city of nine million? It felt like an amazingly small number. The murders were represented by dots. It looked like south London was safer than north London: only three dots. West London was safer than east London, outer London safer than central London. I placed my cursor over one of the dots down near Brixton, clicked on it and the details appeared: knife, thirty-one years old.
That didn’t look right. Poppy hadn’t said anything about a knife. There was violence but her picture showed someone falling. I clicked on three more: knife, knife, knife. The next one said ‘weapon: unknown’. That looked more promising. The woman was called Vicky Silva and she was twenty-eight years old.
I opened a new window and searched for ‘Vicky Silva death’ and immediately found a news report: her husband had pleaded guilty to strangling her. I went back to the map and clicked on another dot: blunt object. What was a blunt object? Yes, something that wasn’t a knife.
I clicked on another dot: ‘weapon: unknown’. Again I did a search on the victim’s name and found a news story: ‘Suspected Murder Suicide’. She had been found dead alongside the body of her husband. The circumstances of the deaths were unclear, but the police had concluded that the husband had killed the wife and then himself. Always that way round, I thought to myself.
Another woman had died in a fire started by an ex-partner. Another was weapon unknown and victim unidentified. What did that mean? It – whatever it was – had taken place in Dartford. This sounded too far out of the way to be significant but I wrote ‘Dartford?’ on my notepad, though I didn’t know what I would do with that.
The next one was also ‘weapon: unknown’. A Russian woman living in Hampstead had been found murdered in her flat and two Russian men and a Russian woman had been arrested. Large amounts of money were involved and it all seemed a bit strange, more complicated, more exotic, and also entirely unconnected with what I was looking for.
Victim number eleven was eighty-nine years old. For some reason, I had always imagined the victim in Poppy’s drawing as young, but there was no reason to. I did a search on the name and found that it had happened during a burglary and the man had been caught and had confessed. Another blunt object.
Victim number twelve’s cause of death was unknown. A search on the name showed that her body had been found in her flat in Stoke Newington. The autopsy had been inconclusive, but a man had already been charged with her murder: another ex-partner.
The thirteenth and final victim had been beaten to death by her boyfriend. He had confessed and been sentenced to life imprisonment. I read a local newspaper story about the crime and the condition of the body when it was found and the events that had preceded it and the previous offences of the murderer, and I had to stop and look away from my screen and take a few deep breaths.
I thought of what had happened to each of those women. The youngest was seventeen and the oldest was eighty-nine. Even among this small number they were from different backgrounds, different cultures. Looking through my notes, I was struck by the fact that only two had been killed by strangers. The biggest danger to these women had been their husbands or their lovers, those they were intimate with, those they trusted. As far as I could make out, most of them had died in their own homes.
I looked around the living room and felt with a shiver that the place I had thought of as my refuge was where I was genuinely vulnerable. We’re all safer with strangers because they don’t care enough about us to kill us.
Still, I hadn’t succeeded in what I had set out to do. I hadn’t found a death that reminded me of Poppy’s drawing. These tragic women had been stabbed or strangled or bludgeoned or trapped in a burning building. But none of them had been pushed off anything. None of them had fallen.
Fallen: not every murder was recognised as a murder. When a person was pushed from a high place, it might look like an accident or like a suicide. I did a search for UK suicides and quickly saw that this was going to be much harder. The UK was a country with few murders but many suicides. A government website told me that in the previous year there had been six and a half thousand suicides registered. Almost three quarters of those were men, but that still left almost two thousand possible cases to go through.
As I read on, I realised that the few murders in the UK are investigated rapidly with plenty of publicity, but suicides are different. They are just one part of the flood of deaths that happen everywhere all the time. They don’t get much publicity, unless they are spectacular, and are investigated not by the police but by inquests that take months or years.
Unless they are spectacular. I read through an account of the different causes of suicide. A few deep breaths weren’t enough. I made myself a mug of coffee and walked outside and stood in my little garden, in the sunshine, until I was ready to continue.
I returned to my laptop. The usual methods by which people took their own lives were drab and domestic. A fall from a high window was the sort of thing that might get into the newspapers. I did a search for ‘falls deaths UK’ and read a series of stories of little children and windows with defective window fastenings, scaffolding failures, mountain climbers’ ropes coming loose, each of them a heart-stopping drama, none of them relevant. I narrowed it to ‘falls deaths London’ and still there was nothing that felt right.
I closed my laptop and sat for several minutes thinking. I was still holding my pen, but there was nothing to write down. I drew little squares and attached triangles to the squares and filled them in with cross-hatching. So where was I? I now felt almost certain that in Greater London, in the first four or five months of this year, no woman had died by falling or being deliberately pushed from a high place or high building. I tapped my pen on the paper. Was there something I was missing?
I reached for my mobile and called Laurie, who sounded surprised to hear from me.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I’m ringing about something that might sound a bit strange, but you’ve spent a lot of time with Poppy recently and I was wondering whether you ever read stories to her and Jake.’
‘Stories? Of course.’ Laurie sounded offended, as if I was criticising his parenting skills. ‘I try to read to them every day, unless Nellie’s having one of her screaming fits.’
‘I know, I know, you’ve been wonderful. I’m asking because Poppy has been doing some odd drawings and I just wondered where she got the ideas from. For example, have you been reading any fairy stories to them?’
‘I don’t know. I just read a few of the books we’ve got around the house. I can show them to you if you want. I’m sure there’s nothing that’s unsuitable.’
‘That’s not what I mean. For example, did you ever read them the story of Rapunzel?’
‘Rapunzel?’
‘That’s the story of the girl in the tower and she’s got long hair and—’
‘Yes, I know what Rapunzel is.’
He was definitely offended, I thought.
‘Did you ever read it to them?’
‘I have not read the story of Rapunzel to Poppy. Or to Jake for that matter. Or any other story involving princesses with long hair.’
‘It was more the tower bit of the story that I was thinking of. Of someone falling from a tower. Or jumping.’
‘I’ve not read any stories about princesses in towers. Or towers in general.’
‘Isn’t there a Disney film about it?’
I heard Laurie laugh at the other end of the line.
‘You’re really pursuing this, aren’t you?’
‘I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what’s been upsetting Poppy.’
‘I don’t think it’s likely to be a fairy story.’ Laurie sounded impatient. ‘Yes, I think there is a Disney cartoon about it, but I haven’t got it or shown it to Jake or Poppy. I know I should encourage Jake to watch films about princesses, but he prefers adventures and fights and that probably makes me a bad father, but—’
‘Of course it doesn’t make you a bad father.’ I paused and he waited. ‘You’re a wonderful father,’ I said. ‘Amazing. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to know. Thank you. Poppy may have got the idea from somewhere, but she didn’t get it from you and it probably doesn’t matter anyway.’
I rang off, hoping I hadn’t sounded unhinged.
So Poppy hadn’t got the idea from a story or film at Gina and Laurie’s. I could check with Lotty. Could they have done a project about Rapunzel or something like Rapunzel in class? And what about Jason? Jason read stories to Poppy, and Emily too. I pondered this. Could a simple story have triggered Poppy’s escalating distress?
There was, of course, another possibility. I had discovered nothing about the truth behind Poppy’s picture or whether there was anything behind it at all. But I had discovered a new truth about my own relationship with Jason. Perhaps, in her unconscious, Poppy had picked up on the discord and the lies and the deceptions of her parents’ break-up and that was what the picture was about.
Perhaps the figure in the picture was actually Poppy herself, in freefall.