Back at home with Poppy, I watched over her as if she were a glass ornament that might break even when gently touched. I had a painful impulse to close the door, keep her with me and protect her for ever and ever. But then I remembered that the very next day Jason was going to fetch her and take her away, back to that house. What if I ran away with her, somewhere where nobody could find us?
This was a ridiculous idea. If I tried anything of the kind, Jason would set the law on me and he would have the law on his side. The result would be not to save Poppy but to lose her altogether. It was terrible. I would do anything to protect Poppy. For the moment, I felt that was the whole purpose of my existence. But I didn’t know how to do it.
As I gave her a bath, I asked her about the party I’d just collected her from. I knew it had been the fourth birthday party of a girl in Poppy’s class called Alicia. But when I asked Poppy about it she said firmly that it wasn’t a birthday party and when I asked if they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Alicia, she said, no, they didn’t. I asked if there had been lots of people and she’d said no. When I asked her how many then, she just held her arms out and said, ‘That many.’
I asked her what games they had played and she said they had played the elephant game. I asked did that mean pin the tail on the elephant and she said no. I asked if it meant making an elephant out of balloons and she said no. I’d recently read her a storybook about an elephant that gets returned to the jungle and I wondered if she had got her memory of that confused with her memory of the party.
And this was the witness whose memories I’d been relying on, whose memories had turned my life upside down.
But there was Skye. I had to hold on to that. Skye had fallen from a tower. Skye had been murdered.
I put Poppy to bed and read her a story that wasn’t about an elephant. Afterwards, I lay beside her for a bit and then suddenly came to and realised we had both fallen asleep.
I had to look around to recognise where I was. I got up and made myself a coffee. I knew that I should eat something. I hadn’t eaten all day. I wasn’t hungry, but I needed to stay in some kind of functioning health. But food could wait. I switched my computer on and checked my emails. There were advertisements from clothes shops and spam about losing wrinkles and dating online and there were the three messages I had forwarded from Jason’s computer: Lara Steed, Nicole and Inga. One from each.
So I had them. What was I going to do with them? I quickly saw that there was only one thing to do. Lara Steed was the most recent, so I clicked on her address and selected ‘new message’. I considered how to do this: breezy, casual, as if it were no big deal. Above all, nothing that would suggest any connection with Jason. I briefly considered disguising my name, but then I’d have to set up a fake email account. That would be like an admission of guilt if something went wrong. My own name would be simplest. I wrote:
Hi Lara,
Sorry to contact you out of the blue, but someone told me you might know a friend of mine: Skye Nolan. I’m trying to find people who knew her. If the name rings a bell, could you reply to this?
All best,
Tess
I stared at the message for a full minute. What could go wrong with this?
So much, in so many different ways.
I pressed send.