The first email had arrived two months or so before Hazel and Jonny had gone to Balcombe Court. It was a Wednesday morning and Hazel had, as usual, checked her iPhone on the way to work. She’d been walking over Waterloo Bridge, the wind in her face, a bright hazy sun in the sky. Black cabs and red buses lumbered past her, the usually rambunctious Big Issue seller on the corner more subdued this morning.
She’d fished her phone out of her handbag as she passed the homeless man, guiltily aware of her salary, her good fortune to be working as a legal secretary in a warm and comfortable office. She’d clicked on her emails, wanting an excuse to look elsewhere.
And then her heart had stopped.
She pulled up immediately on the pavement, causing a commuter behind her to slam into her back, almost sending the phone skittering out of her hand and onto the ground.
‘Watch it,’ the person had growled before pushing past, tutting at her as they moved away. Hazel barely acknowledged the exchange, her eyes fixed on the screen.
The sender’s email address was primrose.bowman@gmail.com.
Her name. Her old name. The sight of those letters, forming those words, the old her, who she used to be . . . it lodged inside her like a knife rammed up to the hilt.
Barely thinking, she opened the email.
I know who you are, Flower Girl.
Hazel’s vision swam and she moved over to the parapet of the bridge, taking in big gulps of air, her eyes fixed desperately on the shimmering river.
Who had sent this to her?
Other than Jonny and her parents – and her mother was dead now – nobody else knew. Other than her parents – and her mother was now dead – nobody else knew. No one.
The Bowmans had left Yorkshire the year Laurel had been sentenced. Even before then, they had been living in various hotels under assumed names. When Laurel was arrested, their house had been covered with graffiti, faeces smeared through their letterbox. When she was found guilty, a glass bottle filled with petrol had been smashed against their front door, alight and explosive. Before and during the trial, they had been bombarded with letters and posters. Email was in its infancy and so they were spared aggression online. But after the trial had concluded, the police had advised that it would be better for them to move away and that, just like the reviled Maxine Carr, or James Bulger’s murderers, for their own safety, they would be given new identities.
The Houses of Parliament had even approved this with a vote. The Home Office had provided them with a small budget to finance the move and arranged their new identification documents because everyone involved with their case had known that, if they were discovered by the public, they would be harmed.
Laurel had been moved to a secure unit in an undisclosed location immediately after the conclusion of the trial. At first, the Bowmans considered moving down south to be near their daughter. But then Hazel’s father had suffered a massive heart attack while packing up their things. His wife Amy had found him an hour later, the radio playing while he lay unconscious on the floor. He had endured a triple bypass and valve replacement, after which time the three of them hadn’t seen Laurel for over six weeks.
By the time the identity change was organised and put into place, Amy – stuffed to the gills with antidepressant medication – hadn’t visited her eldest daughter for nearly four months. They chose a town between Newcastle and Berwick to be their new home. Far away from London and Yorkshire and all the places where people might remember their faces, remember the crime that had made the family pariahs, they called themselves the Archers. Amy became Louise. Gregor became Duncan.
And Rosie became Hazel.
Provided with the cover of a new job for Gregor, the Archers slowly settled in to their new pace of life. They became members of their little community. They were accepted.
One evening, as she left her room to sit on the stairs, unable to sleep, Hazel had overheard her parents speaking together. She could see them through the half-open door, in front of the sitting-room fire, a television programme playing that neither of them was watching.
‘I miss her,’ Gregor said softly. ‘Amy?’ He had turned to look at his wife but she only stared at a patch on the wall. ‘Look at me,’ he’d persisted. ‘She’s down there, sleeping God knows where. Locked up all by herself. At the trial – and right after it – I was so caught up in everything. I couldn’t believe it. I was angry with her. My girl . . .’ He had broken off then, shifting in his chair. ‘Now, though, time has passed and . . . I think we need to arrange a visit. Go and see her. We could write to her too. Now things are more settled. Amy?’
‘Rosie . . . I mean . . .’ Amy jerked her head at the mistake. ‘Hazel, I mean. Hazel’s only seven.’ Her eyes darted quickly to Gregor. ‘She’s got a chance to live a normal life. Nobody here need know what happened. Ever.’
Her husband had frowned then, pushing himself forward in his armchair. The flickering firelight revealed his careful expression. ‘But what about Laurel?’ he asked. ‘Won’t Hazel want to see her sister?’
‘She hasn’t mentioned her. Not to me. Has she to you?’
Gregor didn’t answer.
‘Not once since we came here,’ his wife persisted. ‘I think . . . I think she’s traumatised by it all.’
‘So, are you saying that we shouldn’t see Laurel again?’
‘Not forever.’ Amy swallowed with difficulty, as if the words were stones in her mouth. ‘Just until Hazel is older. When we’ve put this behind us a bit more.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Laurel’s got Toby,’ she said.
Gregor frowned at the mention of his solicitor brother, who had tried to help Laurel. And who had said things to him in the course of the trial that Gregor would never forget. Or forgive. Things he hadn’t told his wife.
‘I can’t bear to lose you,’ she had continued. ‘You or her. We’ve lost so much already. Too much. I can’t take any more.’ She pressed her lips together, eyes fixed on the fire. ‘We need some time to recover. We must feel safe again, Gregor.’ She rested her hand on the arm of her chair and Hazel could see from her perch on the stairs that her mother’s knuckles were white.
As the fire burnt itself out into embers, Gregor looked at his wife. He wanted to go to her and hold her. Feel her close to him again. Then he wanted to scream at her that this conclusion made his newly patched-up heart break again into a thousand pieces. That his Laurel – whatever the press and the courts and the police had said about her – was his little girl and he loved her with his whole being and that the idea of not seeing her every day, or every week at least, was as soul-destroying to him as the idea that she had taken the life of that baby, Kirstie Swann.
But Amy wasn’t close to him any more. She had been far away for a while now. And the truth was, his daughter Laurel too had become something foreign to him, a ghost of her former self, with a vacant space where he had thought he’d known her wholly. That void had been filled in with other ideas, terrible thoughts and images, and, if he were truly honest with himself, he didn’t know what was real about his Laurel any more.
And so he had said nothing more to his wife about visiting her, but waited for the fire to burn down and eventually the ashes turned cold and they went up to bed.
And they never saw Laurel again.
They didn’t mean it to be the case. But they were so far away from London and their letters were often returned to them unopened. As time went on, the gaps between the impulses to write, to make contact, became longer and longer, until it was a month between them, and then a year. And then it was as though Laurel had died. The town they lived in became insular, comforting to them, it became their world. A world they didn’t want to leave; one they were frightened to disturb.
Hazel went to secondary school, then on to college in Edinburgh. She trained as a legal secretary and eventually she moved to London, starting work at the property law firm Peller and Gerrard where she had now been employed for eight years. And in all this time, she had told no one of her past, of who she really is.
Her mother had died three years ago. Hazel couldn’t talk about it, didn’t want to think about it. Her mother’s death had been so searing, it felt as if a layer of skin had been removed. Since then, her father had diminished. He had his few new friends in his new home and that was all he needed. Hazel spoke to him once a week. But she was essentially alone, with no one to confide in, no one she could trust.
Until Jonny had come into her life.
What happened in the past – with Kirstie and with Laurel – remains alive inside Hazel all the time. It never leaves her, like the daemons she’s read about, those shadows that follow people, sit on their shoulders, ever-present. But she blocks it, tries not to think about it, because to unpeel the layers of onion skin she has carefully pasted over the past would lead to more than tears. Kirstie’s face was carved from Medusa’s image and Hazel has already turned to stone. To gaze directly upon what happened to the toddler on that day might fracture that shell, it might cause feelings to leak through her like blood warming in her veins. And, deep down, she is frightened by that thought.
She has got used to it now, over the nineteen years it’s been with her. She bears it like a disability, something she is always aware of, but can live with. She just needs to be careful of it, protect it from public consumption.
She forces out thoughts about Laurel too. She can’t think about her sister. She is something like a shadow on a negative. She exists but she has no substance. She flits through Hazel’s head intermittently: on a cold walk home, after a few glasses of wine, when she pictures a little girl with her hair in bunches on a beach or on the carpet in their tiny pink bedroom.
But Laurel Bowman is gone. She has been erased from Hazel’s life like the deleting of a film, along with all those images of that day, down by the disused canal. It is as if she and the younger Rosie never existed.
Except that someone else knew that Hazel was Laurel’s sister.
Someone else knew that Hazel was one of the Flower Girls.