‘I need to see Jonny,’ Hazel says to Max. ‘I don’t know where he is. He must be with Evie somewhere . . .’ She stares around the bedroom as if he might materialise in front of her.
‘Does he know?’ Max asks. ‘Does he know who you really are?’
Hazel nods, looking down at the photo on the phone she is clutching in her hand. It’s a shot of her and Jonny taken on Waterloo Bridge at sunset, the Houses of Parliament in the background. They’d taken the selfie on their six-month anniversary after dinner at the Oxo Tower. They’d had scallops and steak and gallons of red wine, and on the walk over the bridge, back to Hazel’s flat, Jonny had made them stop. They’d leaned over the parapet, looking down into the water, a late-evening water taxi passing under the bridge. And, for the first time, he’d said he loved her.
‘He’s known for a while. Since not long after we got together,’ she murmurs. ‘But not Evie. It never seemed the right time to say anything. It’s hard enough for me getting to know her without . . . that.’
Max bites his lip. ‘It must be difficult,’ he says, crinkling his brow at the scale of the understatement.
Hazel closes her eyes, thinking back to when she had first met Jonny in a bar next to Waterloo station. At that stage she would never have dreamt of telling him. Even later, when they’d been seeing each other for a few months, had slept together, knew each other’s favourite films, had had their first argument. Even then, she hadn’t told him.
But that night on the bridge, when he’d said those three words, which were a game changer, a world turner – because she felt the same way – then she knew she had to tell him. She hadn’t planned it, had never considered it would be possible to tell anyone, ever. How could she even begin to put into words something she had never dared speak of to anyone before? To reveal that Hazel Archer was, in fact, Rosie Bowman. One of those names in the public psyche that is never forgotten. Like Dennis Nilsen. Fred West. Myra Hindley.
But staring down at the water flowing beneath the bridge, she knew that she had to do it. That, without her sharing the truth with Jonny, they would have no future together. They would have nothing.
She suggested moving on to a bar and they went to some tiny, intimate place. Jonny was still buzzing from his declaration; Hazel was quiet, withdrawn. They sat at a small table with a candle stuck in a wine bottle, wax dripping over the neck. It was so dark they could barely see anyone else. There was no reception so Jonny, for once, could resist the urge to look at his iPhone. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew something was up with Hazel and she knew that he was worrying that she had closed off because of what he’d said, that he’d been too forward, scared her away.
She’d taken his hands over the table, their glasses full and both of them more than a little drunk. He’d looked at her and she’d felt the muscles in her face contract as if she couldn’t keep her desire for him hidden.
‘I have something to tell you,’ she’d said. ‘Something difficult. And, well, something I’ve never told anyone before.’
He’d smiled uncertainly at her then, wanting to be reassured. ‘What is it?’
Hazel shook her head and looked down at her hands on top of the table. At the pink nails she had so carefully polished before she had come out that night. Her heart thumped inside her chest. Was she really going to do this?
‘Do you remember the Flower Girls?’ she asked him at last.
He nodded, confused.
‘The older one, Laurel Bowman,’ she had said. ‘She went to prison. Still is in prison, in fact. Do you remember what happened?’
‘She killed a toddler, didn’t she? Years ago. Down by some canal up north. With her sister. Although,’ he frowned, stopping his glass in mid-air, halfway to his mouth, ‘the younger one didn’t get done for it, I seem to remember.’
‘No. She was too young. She was six, which is under the legal age of criminal responsibility,’ Hazel said then. ‘And, also, she was innocent. She hadn’t hurt the little girl. It was her sister who did.’
Jonny drank from his glass. ‘All right. And? What about it?’
Hazel scored a line in the wood grain with her index fingernail. ‘The older girl – Laurel,’ she said. ‘She’s my sister.’
Jonny looked at her. ‘What?’
He frowned. ‘Your sister? But . . . but that would mean . . . ?’
‘Yes,’ Hazel had said, forcing herself to meet his gaze. ‘I am Primrose. Rosie Bowman. I was the six year old. I was the other Flower Girl.’
She stared into his eyes and suddenly he seemed far away, as if he had retreated somewhere very cold and impossible to reach.
‘But I was innocent,’ she made herself continue, although now it was hard to speak for the lump forming in her throat. She carried on digging her nail into the wood until a splinter pierced her skin. ‘I’m not who they said I was in the papers. I didn’t do anything to hurt that child. I’ve lived for years with the secret. Alone. But I’m a good person. I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just that . . . you told me you loved me tonight. And if you do – if you really do – then you have to know this about me. We can’t have any secrets. Nothing can come between us. Nothing. So I’m telling you.’ She wiped away the tears that had spilled from her eyes. ‘And I just hope that you can accept it. And believe me when I tell you that I’m good. I’m a good person. I really am.’
He had looked at her for a long time, after she’d said all of this. He’d looked at her and then he’d got up from their table and walked off, into the dark of the bar, where she couldn’t see him. She waited there for five, ten, fifteen minutes but he didn’t come back. She couldn’t think clearly. Every coherent thought she’d ever had seemed to be beyond her, out of reach. She watched her tears fall onto the table and, eventually, she had picked the splinter out from her finger. Taking a deep, shaky breath, she got up and went to the toilets, calling Jonny’s name into the Gents. There was no reply. That’s it, she had thought. He’s gone. She returned to the bar and paid their bill and made her way up the stairs where she found him outside on the pavement, smoking a cigarette, although, as far as Hazel knew, he hadn’t smoked in fifteen years.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she had said. ‘I completely understand if you want to go. If you never want to see me again.’
Jonny had looked at her, the cigarette dangling from his fingers, his breath frozen in the cold night air. He said nothing for a while and then threw the cigarette onto the ground, mashing it out with his foot.
‘You know, I always thought I’d recognised you. You seemed so familiar to me. But,’ he gave a bitter laugh, ‘I put it down to how I felt about you. That we were meant to be together.’ He pushed a hand through his hair, thinking. ‘Was it you?’ he asked at last. He looked at her intently, stuffed his hands into his pockets.
‘Did I kill her, do you mean?’ Hazel answered, her voice soft. This was the nub of it. Their relationship stood or fell by this question.
Jonny nodded, his eyes filled with something she couldn’t quite identify. She could see the pulse jumping in his neck, imagine the banging of his chest where his heart thumped beneath.
‘Would it matter if I had?’ she had asked. ‘Because I was there. So . . .’ Her tone was shaded with the weary acknowledgement of someone who has conducted this conversation many, many times before in their head. When she had dreamt of meeting someone she actually wanted to spend her life with – and who wanted to be with her, even though she knew they could never accept everything that she was. ‘I wasn’t legally able to stand trial. I was only six. Besides, I’ve never been able to remember what happened that day.’
They were silent for a moment and for once London was quiet. The cars and the cabs and the buses seemed a universe away from them. The sounds they made were oddly distant, on another planet. There were just the two of them, looking at each other, wondering what the truth of all this was.
‘I need you to say it because it does matter,’ he said. ‘In so many ways, it matters.’
Hazel had nodded in a long moment of realisation and relief. It felt like the buzz of drinking chilled wine on a summer’s evening. She smiled at Jonny and held out her hands. ‘If you can believe me,’ she had said, ‘then I can tell you, right here and now, that I didn’t do it.’
He looked at her, his pupils filled with what seemed to be a kind of longing.
‘I didn’t,’ Hazel went on. ‘I was a child. I followed my big sister and I was led by her. When things turned out . . . the way they did, I didn’t know what was going on. I was so affected by it that I blocked it out. I still don’t remember anything about that afternoon. But I do know this.’ And here she grabbed his hands tight, pulling him to her. ‘I know,’ she said with perfect conviction, as if delivering a speech, ‘I know that I did not hurt that baby. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I would not have been able to sleep since then if I had done such a thing. Of course, the public believe differently and that’s why I’ve lived the life I have, why I’ve got a different name. And no one knows about this. Apart from you.’ She stared up at him. ‘Nobody. I haven’t told anyone else this, ever. But when you said what you did tonight, it was amazing.’ Hazel’s eyes shone. ‘And I feel the same way, Jonny. So I thought it was right that you should know.’
She stopped talking then, searching his face for some kind of sign that he was hearing her, that he understood.
‘But I’ll understand – really I will – if you want to end it.’ She had waited, every muscle taut, breathless.
And then a cab pulled up, its yellow light shining in the gloom.
‘Take the cab,’ she’d said, absorbing the hit. That’s it. He’s gone, she thought again. He can’t be with me after this. What she had always expected had come to pass. She would be left alone. Maybe that was OK. She would go home on her own in another cab. Listen to music. Drink some more wine. And tomorrow she’d wake up, free from hope at least. Because to hope is to expect. And she couldn’t live like that any more.
And that was when he took her hand. They climbed into the back of the cab together and Jonny put his arm around her, and Hazel had never felt so safe and loved as she did at that moment.
‘Shall we get him then?’ asks Max in the hotel room, where they remain on opposite sides of it. ‘Your husband Jonny?’
‘He’s not my husband,’ Hazel answers. ‘He was at breakfast with Evie. I don’t know where he is now.’ She closes her eyes and runs her hand through her hair. ‘This is a nightmare.’
‘Let’s go downstairs and find him,’ Max says, moving towards the door where Hazel is standing. ‘It’s not a nightmare.’ He stops in front of her. ‘We just need to sort it out.’
‘But what about the emails?’ she asks, stepping sideways to allow him to approach the door. ‘You’ve seen them now. Emails from someone – maybe more than one person? – pretending to be Rosie Bowman. They’ve sent me dead flowers. Unsigned cards. They know where I live. I don’t know who is watching me, following me, or what they want. It’s terrifying.’
‘Well . . .’ He stops with one hand on the door handle. ‘I don’t know about that. My feeling is that it’s separate from what’s going on here. But I think if we just sit down with the police, and tell them who you are, you’ll be much more at ease. It all needs to come out in the open. Listen, Hazel.’ Max reaches out for her and she shrinks back. ‘Sorry – I’m sorry. But hiding yourself away like this isn’t going to help. Anonymous people emailing you from an account called Primrose Bowman is horrific. It needs to stop. We need to bring in the authorities. I really mean it. Then you might get some peace.’
He’s looking at her so earnestly that she can’t help herself. She feels a spasm of optimism that, somehow, everything might still be all right.
‘Do you really think so?’ she asks.
‘I do,’ he says, and turns the handle, opening the door onto the bright lights of the corridor, trying to ignore the hammering in his head, the adrenaline coursing through him, the terrible, delicious thought that has only just occurred to him.
That now he is going to be famous.