You started talking first, to someone off camera who had been edited out. Your voice was serious and mature, like a newsreader, and you had the same broad forehead and wide-set eyes as Ellie and Poppy. I could see the line that went straight down through the three of you; it was breathtaking. You talked about the golden light of your girl, the journey she’d been taking to the stars when she went, the laughter and the dreams, the lasagne she’d asked you to save for her lunch on her return. Your eyes turned to glass as you talked. You circled your narrow wrists with your thumb and fingers. You had beautiful hands: long, elegant, feminine.
Paul started to talk then. I don’t mean to be rude but I could tell that he was a flibbertigibbet. Well meaning but ultimately pointless. And I could tell that you were no longer a couple. Your body language was all off. He talked about the bond he’d had with his daughter – with all of his children, he hastened to add – how she’d been an open book, always told her parents everything, didn’t have any secrets. His eyes also turned to glass and flicked briefly towards you. He was hoping, desperately I could tell, for some reassurance, but he did not get it. While you spoke, pictures flashed up at intervals of Ellie: as a child at the foot of a plastic slide; on the back of a speedboat with her father’s arm around her, the wind in her hair; on Christmas Day in a silly hat; and in a restaurant with her arm around an elderly lady who looked likely to be a grandmother.
The girl looked far too alive to be dead, I thought. Even in those slightly blurred photographs I could feel the essence of her, sense the sheer joy of her. But it was a coincidence, I persuaded myself, that’s all it was. A young girl with a fairly commonplace name who’d disappeared a year before Poppy was born and bore a striking resemblance to her.
Then the interview faded out and the re-enactment began.
And that was when I knew, that was when all the little pieces of the puzzle fell into place and I knew it was no coincidence. There was the High Road, the café on the corner of Noelle’s road, the Red Cross shop where she bought her nasty clothes. The camera panned across the street and I could even see the distant bloom of cherry blossom on the tree outside her house. My skin covered over with goosebumps.
Because, you see, Noelle had told me once in a fit of anger that she was not Poppy’s real mother, that a girl called Ellie had had her baby for her. I hadn’t been sure at the time if it was her madness that had caused her to say such a thing or if it might in fact be true. I had never seen her naked while pregnant. She had not allowed me to touch her. But still, it seemed far-fetched. I hadn’t given it too much credence.
And if it had in fact been true then I’d always imagined the mythical Ellie as a desperate addict, some loser that Noelle had picked up off the street and thrown some money at to carry her fake child for her. But here on my TV screen was a beautiful young girl with her whole life ahead of her, vanished off the face of the earth and last seen virtually outside Noelle’s house.
This was not a child who would have left her family behind, her boyfriend and her future, to willingly bear a baby for a stranger. And this sent my thoughts spiralling back to those days after Noelle’s disappearance, when I’d gone to her house to collect Poppy’s things. I thought of the weird basement room I told you about, nothing in it but the stained old sofa bed, the dead hamsters, the TV with built-in VCR, the three locks on the door.
And I knew, immediately, that Noelle was capable of stealing a child.
And I knew immediately what I needed to do.
Sixty-one
You know, Laurel, all my life all I ever wanted was to feel like everyone else. I’d turn up in some different country at some new school and I’d see all the kids who’d grown up together, whose mums and dads all drank wine together at the weekends, all these laid-back kids with their in-jokes and their basement dens and their nicknames. And I’d look at them and think, How do you do that? How does that even work? I was never anywhere long enough to get a nickname. I was just ‘the new boy’. Every couple of years. ‘Hey, you, new boy.’ And being a virtual fucking genius didn’t really do me any favours either. Nobody likes a clever clogs. And I was a terrible clever clogs. My cleverness oozed out of me like goo.
Also I was not good-looking in the least. Plus bad at sports and completely disinterested. And of course I had these high-flying parents who clearly didn’t think there was any sacrifice too big for the sake of their careers, who genuinely, genuinely didn’t seem to realise that children liked being with their parents. They threw activities at me and told themselves that as long as I was busy I must surely be happy.
There was one school, one town, in Germany. I liked that school. It was an international school, kids from all over the world; a lot of them couldn’t even speak English. And a transient intake, kids coming and going all the time. So for once I had an advantage. I could speak English. And I was there for nearly four years, from eleven to fourteen. So I started off as one of the youngest and became one of the oldest. This was good stuff. Formative. Almost transformative. I’d see new kids arrive, little ones, foreign ones, tiny little Korean kids or Indian kids or Nigerian kids, struggling with the language, struggling with the culture shock. And that made me feel normal.
I had a girlfriend there. Mathilde. She was French. Quite pretty. We kissed a few times and maybe if my parents hadn’t dragged me away by the scruff of my neck at that precise moment and dropped me down in the next place, maybe I’d have had a chance to develop that normality, become a guy with a core and a soul.
As it is, I don’t think I ever really loved anyone, until Poppy came along.
And even now I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word.
After all, I have nothing to compare it to.
Why didn’t I go straight to the police after seeing Ellie on Crimewatch, that’s what you’d like to know, isn’t it? And it’s a very good question.