Letters To My Daughter's Killer - [30]

Still no answer.

‘You were a very good girl with Mummy and Daddy, their best girl. They both love you lots and lots. We don’t know why Daddy hurt Mummy so she couldn’t get better, but you didn’t do anything wrong. You were good. Shall we have a cuddle?’

She ignores that too, straightens up, drags the hat from her head and throws it down. She goes inside.

I feel like a failure, but what did I except? She’s four. I can barely remember being four; my only memory from then is of kindergarten, of a striped smock I wore for painting.

‘Nana?’ she calls after a few minutes. She’s in the kitchen. A wasp has fallen in her cup and is spinning round, buzzing angrily in its effort to escape. I take the whole thing outside and chuck it. She waits at the door, watches the wasp until it flies off.

‘I want to go home,’ she says, her lip quivering.

‘I’m sorry, Florence, you can’t go home, you have to stay here.’

‘I want to go home with Mummy.’

‘Mummy’s not there. Mummy’s dead. She can’t go home. She can’t go anywhere any more. One day we will all get together, all Mummy’s family, and have a special day and say goodbye, but she won’t be able to hear us, or see us, because Mummy’s body doesn’t work any more. It’s broken.’

‘The doctors could make it better,’ she says.

‘No, they can’t.’

‘Can they make Daddy better?’

‘Daddy’s not dead. He’s alive, like me and you, but he has to go to court and the people there will decide if he hurt Mummy and made her die.’ All the time I’m thinking: this is grotesque, macabre, but the websites I’ve consulted say the same thing: be honest, talk openly, be direct, use simple age-appropriate language.

Her face is blank, like she’s hiding. I have no idea where she’s gone. What she is thinking or feeling.

Did she know? Know that you sometimes battered her mother? Know that Daddy got nasty and smacked Mummy hard?

Too hard this time.

What have you done?

* * *

Three weeks after Lizzie’s death, I am at school with Florence. Time to get her back into the routine. She does not want to be here, but she is not crying or throwing a tantrum. Just very quiet.

The friends she made before, Ben and Paige, are pleased to have her back. They keep coming up with little offerings, trying to draw her out, like Milky and his dead birds for me.

Florence barely makes eye contact. I am sitting at the table nearby. We have read four books together and then, with my thighs aching from her weight (it’s a child-sized chair), I persuade her to sit in the Wendy house in the corner – decorated to represent a greengrocer’s. I don’t expect to leave her here today. It will be a slow process.

The only time I read these days is for Florence. My library books are well overdue. I’ve lost all interest, any ability to concentrate, to engage. It’s like losing a sense almost.

You have been named, once you’d appeared in court; it was all over the place. They used the photo from your Spotlight entry, which must be years out of date. The children in reception are too young to understand what’s happened, but those with brothers or sisters in the older classes may hear it being talked about and perhaps repeat what they hear. Children will talk, will gossip, just like adults. We can only hope that Florence’s infamous status won’t lead to her being taunted: Your mummy’s dead. Your daddy did it. So tempting for a child looking for easy prey.

I cannot shake the sense of shame, prickly on my skin, hot inside. Shame because you killed her, shame that I didn’t know you were a risk, that I didn’t protect her. We are all tainted. Would it be easier if it had been a random attack by a stranger? I imagine so. One huge loss, not two.

Ruth

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

17 Brinks Avenue

Manchester

M19 6FX

The independent post-mortem for your defence has been done, the coroner has released Lizzie’s body. It is December.

I touch Lizzie’s hand. It feels cold and smooth and dense. And dead.

The undertaker has covered her face with a white cloth. He has dressed her in the clothes I brought. The green and blue silk tunic that she loved, those linen trousers.

It is cool in the funeral parlour; my arms bristle with goose bumps. She can’t feel it. Her bare arms. And her feet. Toenails polished pink to match her fingers. The undertaker has done a manicure. Her hands. Slender fingers more like mine than Tony’s, but even slimmer than mine. Longer. We used to compare her to ourselves. Allocating features and traits. His eyes, my hair, his sense of humour, my love of language, his blood group, my laugh, his teeth, my fear of heights.

Her hands, fluid and fast, making signs, symbols, flowing from one shape to another, making sense. A different language, one I couldn’t use, beyond a handful of words.

She never told me about your violence, not in English or in sign language. Should I have read it? In the spaces between words, in the flicker of her eye or the incline of her head? Did she ever send me a signal that I missed?

The new truth casts shadows over everything past. So now when I remember you and her – at your wedding, at the hospital when Florence was born, posing by the Andy Goldsworthy trees on that trip we made to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – I no longer trust the memory. I see jeopardy instead, and enmity and apprehension. Her smile to you is one of sick submission, the way she catches your hand a quest for your blessing or forgiveness. Her laughter, her kiss, an effort to please, to praise, to placate.