Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

Laurel reaches to pick one up. It’s hugely heavy in her hand, as she’d known it would be. Because they are her candlesticks, the candlesticks taken in the burglary four years after Ellie disappeared, the candlesticks she’s always been certain Ellie took.

‘I don’t really like them,’ says Poppy. ‘I think they were Mum’s. You can have them if you like.’ ‘No,’ says Laurel, putting it back on the shelf, her stomach churning over and over. ‘No. They’re yours. You keep them.’

That girl. That bloody girl. She’d passed over at some point. I don’t know when exactly. It was for the best, I’d say. Yes, it was for the best. According to the papers they’d scaled back the search for her. That to me said they had her as a runaway. So I decided to make it look that way.

It’s odd, you know, because when I look back to those days when I was her tutor I feel sure I must have dreamed the whole thing, because by the end I swear I had no idea what I’d ever seen in her. No idea at all. She was, after all, just a girl.

I looked everywhere for her passport. The passport was the key to everything. But it could not be found for love nor money. And then I had the most brilliant idea. I’d seen her sister when I’d been watching the house and the two girls were very similar to look at. So I went to the sister’s bedroom and found her passport in under a minute. I slipped it in the big bag with the computer and the candlesticks and the cake in its Tupperware box and ten minutes later I was home.

Then one day, and you’ll remember this day, Floyd, it was pretty significant, you told me you were thinking about home-schooling Poppy. I’d just filled in the forms on the internet for a place at our local primary school. But that wasn’t good enough apparently: oh no, nothing was good enough for your precious Poppy. Only you, Floyd. Only you.

‘My mini-me.’ That’s what you used to call her. As though I literally had nothing whatsoever to do with the child. And as though only a child who mirrored you in every single respect could possibly be worth loving.

what you didn’t know was what I’d done to get that child for you. You had no idea. You had no idea that my life was not a life, not in any real sense of the word, and that the only thing that lit the path for me was you, Floyd. And if you had full custody of Poppy then, really, what was the use of me? You’d have no reason to see me any more. You’d have no reason to keep me on side. I couldn’t let you take Poppy. She was my ticket to you. We started that conversation like adults and finished it in a red heat. I knew then that you wouldn’t let it go. And a few weeks later you found your moment and you pounced.

And you turned to me and you said, ‘That’s it, Noelle. That is it.’ And I knew what you meant and I knew it was going to happen. So that was when I decided. Me and Poppy. We were going away. And if you wanted us back you’d have to come and find us.

In this fantasy, you would decide to stay. You’d rent a small windswept cottage and eventually, because we were all so happy and everything was so perfect, you’d ask us to move in with you. And that was how we’d end our days. The three of us together. The perfect family.

‘No,’ says Floyd. ‘Noelle didn’t have much of a family. Or at least not one she told me about. It’s possible they were estranged. It’s possible they were dead. She might have had a dozen brothers and sisters for all I know.’ He sighs. ‘Nothing would surprise me about that woman. Nothing.’

Floyd sighs. ‘Poor sick woman,’ he says. ‘Poor, poor individual.’ ‘Sounds like the only good thing she ever did was to give birth to Poppy.’ He glances at her and then down at his lap. His eyes are dark and haunted. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose it was.’

I kept you very sweet in those days after our big contretemps. I made all the right noises about Poppy coming to live with you, pretended I was ‘giving it some thought’, said that I could ‘see the advantages’. But all the while I was painstakingly planning our escape.

But I’d underestimated you. You’d worked out what was going on. Poppy wasn’t there when I came for her that evening. You’d taken her to stay at someone’s house. You were ready for me.

Here it came. Here it came. ‘I think you’re toxic.’ Toxic. Dear Jesus.

‘Could you let her go? Please? You could still see her. Of course you could. But it would have to be under supervision. It would have to be here. And it would have to fit in with Poppy’s education.’

You’re not well in the head, Noelle. You’re not well. And you’re not fit to be a parent.’

I thought of what I’d allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you.

I wanted to hurt you, I wanted to really hurt you so I said to you, ‘What makes you so sure she’s your child, Floyd? Did you never wonder why she looks so little like either of us?’

‘She doesn’t belong to either of us, Floyd,’ I said, feeling the twist of my words into your heart. ‘I made her for you, with another woman’s womb and another man’s sperm.’

‘A girl called Ellie had that baby for me. I was never pregnant, you dumb idiot. How could you have thought I was, you with your big, brilliant brain? Ellie had that baby. She was the mother. And the father was some stranger on the internet selling his sperm for fifty pounds a shot.’

Poppy’s father was a young, young man, a PhD student. The website I bought his sperm from said he was under thirty, that he was six foot one with green eyes and dark hair. I pictured Ellie’s boyfriend when I picked him out. I pictured Theo. And then I came to you in my satin shirt and high heels and seduced you in a way that you’d be sure to remember. The whole thing was a total scam, Floyd. And you fell for it, you feckless, bollockless, soulless shit. You totally fell for it.

And then I watched your face turn to stormy skies, saw your skin colour change from grey to seething purple. You leaped to your feet; then you threw yourself bodily across the table at me. You had your hands at my throat and my chair tumbled backwards with me still in it, my head hit the floor and by God I thought you meant to kill me, by God, I really, really did.

Theo was Ellie’s. He’d belonged to her and she’d belonged to him. They’d inhabited each other completely, like a pair of gloves folded into itself. And now she is cross with Hanna. Cross enough to wonder what Theo even sees in Hanna, in comparison to Ellie. She imagines, in the warped threads of her irrational thought processes, that Theo chose Hanna as a consolation prize.

it occurs to her for the very first time that maybe Hanna isn’t intrinsically unhappy. That maybe she just doesn’t like her.

She hears Paul take a breath. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘You did nothing wrong. But I’d say, well, it wasn’t just Ellie she lost, was it? It was you, too.’

‘Laurel,’ he says carefully, ‘I think what Hanna really needs from you is your forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness …’ he says finally, ‘for not being Ellie.’

She’s looking for something to snap her out of the strange fug she’s been trapped in for the past few days. And suddenly she has it in her hands. A pile of newspaper cuttings, all from around the time of the Crimewatch appeal on 26 May. There’s her face, there’s Paul, and there’s Ellie.

I sometimes wish …’ She glances towards the sitting-room door and then lowers her voice. ‘I love being with Dad. But I sometimes wish there was more.’

She thinks of the press cuttings on Floyd’s desk. She thinks of the carrot cake they’d shared in that café near her hairdresser, the overpowering certainty of him as he’d walked in the door and found his way to her. And then she thinks of the phone call from Blue. Your boyfriend. His aura is all wrong. It’s dark. And she feels it, right there and then. Stark and obvious. You’re not who you say you are, she suddenly thinks, you’re a fake.

Blue sighs and continues, clearly in her element. ‘Floyd has strange colours in his aura. A lot of dark, dark colours. There’s dark green, which suggests low self-esteem and resentment. And dark red, which suggests anger. And dark pink, which is immaturity and dishonesty. But that is far from how he presents himself to the world. The discrepancy between his aura and his presentation is striking. It’s like he’s taking cues from people. Working out how to be. And then there’s the way he is with his daughter. It’s not quite right. He watches her all the time, did you know that? You can almost see him prompting her under his breath. Like she’s acting, too, and he’s there to stop her making a mistake, to stop her exposing him for what he is. I don’t think …’ She pauses. ‘I don’t think he really loves her. Not in the normal sense of the word. I think it’s more that he needs her, because she makes him human. She’s like a cloak.’

‘But what you said, about him being dangerous. What did you really mean by that?’ ‘I meant’, says Blue, ‘that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed. And I think Floyd is dangerous because he’s pretending to be someone he’s not in order to get you to love him.’

‘What about Poppy?’ she says. ‘What is her aura like?’ ‘Poppy’s aura’, Blue says, ‘is like a rainbow. Poppy is everything. But she needs to get away from her father before he starts taking her colours away.’

‘And me?’ There is a long pause. ‘Your aura is so faded I can barely see the colours in it, Laurel.’

What a strange girl Blue is, she thinks to herself, turning off her lights, slipping off her clothes, untwirling the tinsel from her hair. What a very strange girl indeed.

Because I know and now she knows it, too. I am not the man she thought I was.

She is ready to push him from her, ready to escape. She can’t imagine that she’d ever found this man’s touch pleasing. She can’t imagine she’d ever found this man anything other than terrifying.

I have something of yours. It was not given to me; rather, bequeathed to me in a terrible sequence of events. I need you to know that when I first came into possession of this precious thing, it had been horribly abused by another person and for five years I have tended and cared for this possession. I have polished it and nurtured it.

Everything that happened after that meeting was entirely unexpected, and, I can see now with hindsight, horribly, horribly selfish.

Crimewatch. Not a show I’d normally watch. Not my thing at all. But they said they’d be staging a reconstruction of the disappearance of a girl called Ellie Mack and then a picture of Ellie Mack appeared on the screen and my heart stopped. The missing girl looked exactly like Poppy. Older than Poppy. But exactly like her. So I sat and I watched the show.

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.

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.

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.

Poppy came into my life and she was so exquisite and so clever and she adored me. For the first time in my life I had something beautiful and precious that nobody else had, nobody in the world. And if she wasn’t mine then my life no longer made any sense to me.

after watching the Crimewatch special I realised that if she was mine and if I told the police what I knew about Noelle and Ellie that there would be no police officer, no detective, no judge and no juror that would ever, in a million years, believe that Ellie had been impregnated with my sperm without my knowledge or consent. It was preposterous. Clearly. I would be done, at the very least, for aiding and abetting. And I would be done for rape of a minor. A minor that I’d never even met.

did not get a DNA test done even though proof that Poppy was not genetically my child would free me to report what I knew to the police. I si...

I came to the funeral.

Closure, it seemed, had brought you nothing but a box of bones. But I could give you something that would get you out of the sinking mud and walking towards the horizon. I could give you Poppy.