Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy.
She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, ‘I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.’ A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better than two. Ruby died a week later.
Laurel’s hopeless brother is not here either. He’d flown back from Dubai for Ruby’s funeral in January and said he couldn’t make two trips in one year.
And, of course, Ellie is not here.
Laurel hasn’t told Poppy the full truth about Ellie. She said that Ellie ran away from home and then got run over and left in a wood and that at some point between running away and getting run over she’d had a baby and that Noelle had adopted the baby and given her to Floyd when she couldn’t cope any more.
Neither has she told Poppy about the body in Floyd’s garden. She’d simply packed a small bag for Poppy and brought her to her flat in Barnet for a few days while the big plastic tent was erected over the flowerbed, helicopters buzzing overhead. As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. ‘I really didn’t mind, you know,’ she said. ‘Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.’
‘No,’ Laurel had said, wiping a single tear from Poppy’s cheek with her thumb and then rocking her in her arms. ‘No. He didn’t.’
The bus pulls up outside the canal-side restaurant where Theo and Hanna will be holding their wedding reception. The party duly dismounts and smooths down its skirts and rebuttons its jackets, adjusts its hair against the sharp wind blowing in off the top of the water. Paul approaches. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket.
Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatised by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.
Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in hundred different ways. But she is OK. Laurel is OK. She really is. Because she has Hanna and she has Jake and now she has Poppy and Theo too. Her relationship with Sara-Jade has grown deep and strong in the months since Floyd’s death. She sees her frequently, for Poppy’s sake but also for her own. She sees something of herself in Sara-Jade, something important in some way, something to nurture.
Hanna lives with Theo now. She rents out the miserable flat in Woodside Park and Laurel no longer needs to be her cleaning lady. Everything about their previous dynamic has been transformed. They are friends. And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.
Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl.
Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.
Epilogue
The woman clutches the piece of paper inside her hands and stares desperately through the glass screen at the policewoman sitting there. She’d told her someone would be along in a minute but that was nearly half an hour ago and she really needs to get going before she gets a parking ticket and the frozen chicken breasts in the boot of her car start to defrost.
‘Excuse me,’ she says a minute later, ‘I’m really sorry but my parking’s about to run out and I really have to go. Could I just leave this here with you?’ She holds up the piece of paper.
The policewoman looks up at her and then at the piece of paper, then back at her again. ‘Sorry?’ she says, as though she’s never seen her before or been told about the paper.
‘This letter,’ the woman says, trying her hardest not to sound impatient. ‘The letter I found in a book I got from the Red Cross shop.’
‘Right,’ says the policewoman. ‘Sure. Let me take it.’
The woman hands the letter to the policewoman and watches as she reads it, watches her facial expression change from disinterest to alarm to sadness and then to shock. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘tell me again where you found this?’
‘I told you,’ says the woman, her patience stretching very, very thin. ‘I bought a book last month from the Red Cross shop on Stroud Green Road. A Maeve Binchy. I only just got round to reading it last night. And this note fell out. It’s her,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? It’s that poor girl? The one who had the baby in the basement?’
The policewoman looks up at her and the woman can see that her eyes are wet with tears. ‘Yes,’ says the policewoman. ‘It is.’
Both of them let their eyes fall back to the letter then and they both fall silent as they reread it together, squinting to make out the minuscule words squashed tightly side by side on a tiny scrap of paper:
To anyone who finds this note [it begins], my name is Ellie Mack.
I am seventeen. Noelle Donnelly brought me to her house on 26 May 2005 and kept me captive in her basement for about a year and a half. I have had a baby. I don’t know who the father is and I’m pretty sure I’m still a virgin. Her name is Poppy. She was born in April 2006. I don’t know where she is now or who is looking after her but please, please find her if you can. Please find her and look after her and tell her that I loved her. Tell her that I looked after her for as long as I could and that she was the best little baby in the world. Also, please let my family know that you’ve found this note. My mum is called Laurel Mack and my dad is called Paul and I have a brother called Jake and a sister called Hanna and I want you to tell them all that I’m sorry and that I love them more than anything in the world and that none of them must feel bad about what happened to me because I am brave and I am brilliant and I am strong.
Yours sincerely,
Ellie Mack
Acknowledgements
I finished writing this book in December 2016. I read it through and thought, hmm, this is either brilliantly bizarre, or just bizarre. I’d lost all objectivity and passed it to my editor with no worldly clue how she would respond.