We swung Poppy to the bus stop. We swung her as we walked into the forest. We looked like the perfect little family. I had a blanket and Aidan had the picnic in his backpack. He was wearing a green tee shirt and grey cotton trousers and he looked relaxed and happy. He identified trees, gestured to a buzzard wheeling above us, pointed out the elderflower growing thickly along the path.
‘We should make elderflower juice,’ he said. ‘Would you like that, Poppy?’
‘No.’
He grinned as though her answer pleased him.
When we spread out the picnic, he had brought a bottle of champagne and two glasses wrapped in newspaper to keep them safe. He had fizzy drink in a can for Poppy and lots of miniature foods – tiny falafels and sausages and salmon rolled up with cream cheese. There were cherries as well as strawberries. Chocolate biscuits, which were sticky in the heat.
He poured out champagne and we clinked glasses and he said, ‘Here’s to us,’ and tapped his glass against Poppy’s drink as well.
She edged towards me. I took a sip of the champagne, and when he wasn’t looking tipped the rest onto the dry mossy ground. He reached up and delicately removed a twig from my hair. I couldn’t do this. If he touched me again, I would lash out. If he touched Poppy, I would claw at his face.
He put his hand over mine and I let him. I turned my head and I smiled at him and felt disgust in my throat like thick silt. How could he not tell?
On the way home, Poppy went to sleep curled up against me and I carried her from the bus stop, refusing Aidan’s offers to take her from me. He followed me into the flat and waited while I laid Poppy on her bed.
‘How asleep is she?’
I knew what he meant and pretended not to.
‘She’ll wake in a few minutes. She doesn’t usually nap in the day.’
‘I understand, of course, but she doesn’t seem that happy I’m back in her life.’
‘She’s tired.’
‘She wants to have you to herself. I get it.’ He smiled at me – that small half-smile I used to find so sympathetic. ‘I’m sure she’ll get used to me in time.’
I couldn’t do this. I felt physically incapable of meeting his eye, of returning his smile, of letting him lay his hands on me, of kissing him back. I turned towards him.
‘Aidan. It was lovely, but you know that nothing’s really changed, don’t you?’
‘Everything’s changed.’
‘No. I mean, the reason that I ended things – it was because I wasn’t in a good state. I needed to sort things out and I still do.’
‘I know. And I know what you’re going through and I can help, I can be there for you. I can be your rock, the person you can always turn to.’
‘I think,’ I said as firmly and kindly as I could, ‘that we should put things on hold. Just till I’m ready.’
Never never never never.
‘No,’ Aidan said. ‘I think in the past I sometimes felt a bit raw because you always put Poppy before me, but one of the reasons I fell in love with you in the first place was that you are such a fabulous mother. Of course you have to put her first. I understand that now in a way that I didn’t before.’
‘But I have no room in my life for a relationship.’
‘I don’t think that’s true. Think of last night. To me it felt like coming home. And I believe it was like that for you as well.’
Then he put a hand on my naked arm. I looked down at his four fingers, slightly apart, pressing into my skin.
‘You trusted me,’ he said, speaking slowly, each word distinct. ‘You trusted me with everything, Tess, everything you’ve been thinking and feeling. Everything you’ve done. Things that you can’t tell anyone else, mustn’t tell anyone else. I will always remember that.’
What was he saying? I blinked; my eyes felt scratchy and sore.
‘I would never tell a soul,’ he continued. ‘I know what you stand to lose if, for instance, Jason and his lawyer found out about you breaking into his house, hacking into his computer, sending yourself those emails, seeing Inga after they’d given you that final warning. I know how completely terrifying that must feel.’
He meant Poppy: that’s what I stood to lose. I stared at him, unable to turn away.
‘You’re in a horrible position.’ His voice was mild and tender; his eyes were on me. ‘People haven’t believed you: Jason, the police. They think you are hysterical, mad, dangerous. I don’t think that. I know you. I know what a fierce, loyal and wonderful woman you are. You’d do anything to protect Poppy. I know that. You’re on a knife edge.’
I tried to speak, but my voice faltered.
‘I’m here for you,’ he said. ‘Come what may. So don’t say we should end things or put them on hold. Don’t say that, my lovely Tess, because what would I do if you said that?’
I understood and I saw him seeing I understood. His gaze never wavered and his warm hand remained on my arm, his fingers pushing into my flesh. Slender fingers, like a pianist’s.
‘Mummy! Mummy Mummy Mummy.’
‘Coming now,’ I called. I pulled back from Aidan, tried to give him a smile that wouldn’t look like a snarl of fear and disgust. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You need to go.’
‘No worries,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you later. We’ll make plans.’
Poppy and I played Grandmother’s Footsteps in the little garden that I could cover in five strides. Poppy stood with her back to me, her body tense with the effort of not turning.
I took a small step.
Aidan had killed two women because of me. He killed Skye because she must have threatened to tell me about their fling, if fling was the right word for a man ‘rescuing’ a woman when drunk, taking her back to her flat and having sex with her. I remembered Aidan and me at the party after I discovered Jason’s infidelities, me wrapping my arms around his neck. I heard my words: If you ever cheat on me, we’re over. No second chances.
Another step. Poppy was practically vibrating with her desire to look round.
I saw Skye in the restaurant, pointing a finger at me, smiling and smiling, and opposite me sat Aidan.
My small world had been bristling with acts of domestic surveillance: everyone had been watching everyone else, tracking everyone else, keeping their own secrets and prying into other people’s.
I thought about the cap that Skye had held in her hands that evening, Aidan’s cap, and Aidan, sitting beside me with his unwavering expression, had seen it. She must have slipped it into Poppy’s little backpack that day in the park with Jason: the cap he was wearing in the photo I had, the cap Skye had worn in that photo on my phone, the cap I had upstairs. The whole thing had been a show she had put on for him.
Another small step. Poppy turned and I froze and she grinned and turned back again.
Skye must have followed Aidan to my house after the second time he’d gone to hers. She had watched us and tracked us. She had retrieved the mutilated Milly from my bin and she had sewn it back into a mockery of a beloved rag doll and returned it to me via Poppy. I had shown the doll to Aidan, and Aidan had gone the following night when he was supposed to be at the conference and killed her, pushing her from her balcony as if she was a rag doll herself.
Aidan had also spied on us, kept track of me when I thought I was free, and I in my turn had spied on Jason, trailing him, breaking into his house and his computer.
My daughter had been a spy in her own life as well, though she hadn’t been able to decode the things that she had heard and witnessed. Poppy had watched her father kissing a strange woman. Poppy had watched Aidan with Skye, maybe from her open window or maybe from the top of the stairs while I slept. I would never know how much she had seen and heard and taken into her crowded imagination.
I will kill you, you fucking cunt. I will push you from your balcony and no one will know. Except my daughter had known, with her eyes like saucers and her ears taking in everything.
Again. I could almost reach out and touch Poppy now.
Skye and then, when he realised that he wasn’t quite safe, Peggy. Coming to see me after he’d done it, looking tired and peaceful. He had thought it was all over and now we could be together again.
I stood quite still in the little garden, the sun beating down and the birds singing, thinking, tiptoeing forward. Aidan wanted me. He wanted us. He thought in some horrible way that we belonged to him, and now he believed he had us: You’re on a knife edge, I heard him say.
Poppy had watched and Poppy had listened and Poppy had tried to tell me with her drawing, her obscenities, her night terrors, the way that she clutched at me with pincer fingers, her high-wire anxiety and need. I’d seen all the signs and misread them all.
Now she whirled round, her hair flying and her mouth agape in a shout of laughter.
‘I do see you move!’ she shouted in triumph. ‘I do see.’