Firstly, at this juncture, I did not know whether Ellie was dead or alive. I did not know how long she’d been in Noelle’s basement, assuming she had ever been there. And according to the TV show, there was a slim possibility that she’d let herself into your house four years after her disappearance and helped herself to some cash and valuables. So Ellie was potentially anywhere or nowhere and the narrative was all over the place.
But that in itself was not a good enough reason to stop me telling the police what little I knew. You see, what concerned me the most was my role in this scenario. Another thing that Noelle told me the day she told me that she wasn’t Poppy’s real mother was that I was not Poppy’s real father. She told me that the baby had been conceived using sperm she’d bought off the internet. I’d locked this unpalatable little nugget away with all the other stuff she told me and stuck my head in the sands of denial. Poppy was literally, Laurel, literally the only good thing that had ever happened to me. My pride and joy. My entire raison d’être. You know how difficult my relationship with Sara-Jade has always been. You know how she hated me as a child, spat in my face, bit me and scratched me. I thought that was what fatherhood was. I thought that was the child I deserved. And then 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.
But 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.
But again I prevaricated. I 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 simply wasn’t ready to let her go, Laurel. I’m so sorry.
Shortly after the Crimewatch special I read an interview with you in the Guardian. It was some kind of real-life interest story in the magazine. You said, and I quote: ‘The nightmare of the thing is the not knowing. The lack of closure. I just cannot move forward without knowing where my daughter is. It’s like walking through sinking mud. I can see something on the horizon, but I can never, ever get to it. It’s a living death.’
And then a month later there were the headlines in the papers. ‘ELLIE’S REMAINS FOUND’. You had your closure. I came to the funeral. I stood at a respectful remove. I saw your legs buckle as your husband helped you into the crematorium and saw them buckle again on the way out. 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.
Sixty-two
I became fixated on you, Laurel. I raked the internet for articles about you, for photographs and clips of the press conference you’d given the day after Ellie disappeared. You were such a refined woman. So succinct and articulate, no words wasted, no emotional incontinence, your pretty hands always twisted together so intricately, the sharply cut hair, the tailored clothes; no lace or buttons or trim. Even in your clothing choices you wasted nothing.
And in watching you I became more and more familiar with Paul. The shirts that looked conventional at first sight until you realised that there was a contrast trim of Liberty print inside the collar. The cufflinks that appeared to be tiny dog heads. The slightly unusual horn-framed glasses. A flash of geometric-printed silk sock inside a handmade shoe.
Further investigation of such clothing showed that he shopped primarily at Paul Smith and Ted Baker. I began experimenting with a pair of socks here and a silk handkerchief there. Then I took myself for a proper shave in a barber shop. I had never before had a proper shave. In fact I rarely shaved; I tended to let the stubble grow out until my face itched, scratch it all off with a – generally – blunt razor, leave myself with a blotchy, butchered face and then let it all grow back again. Clothes shopping for me was a joyless affair: a whizz around M&S with a basket twice a year. I began to enjoy browsing these boutiques for gentlemen. I liked the snake-hipped sales assistants, so eager to help, to guide me in the right direction. Then I had a proper haircut, found some products that gave my rather sparse and gravity-challenged hair the appearance of volume and lift, bought a pair of clear-lensed glasses with horn frames and the transformation was complete.
It was a gradual process, over the course of a couple of months. It wasn’t as if I just suddenly popped up one day with a brand-new image like one of those awful TV makeover shows. I’m not sure anyone I saw regularly even noticed.
I just wanted to show myself to you and for you to like me. That’s all it was. For you to find me familiar. To find me the kind of person with whom you could share a slice of cake. I wanted us to be friends and then I wanted you and Poppy to be friends. Because by now I had had a DNA test done. By now I knew, with only 0.02 per cent of a chance of improbability, that Poppy was not my child and that the only person she truly belonged to was you.
I had not expected mutual attraction. I had not expected your hands inside the sleeves of my jumper in the restaurant, our desperate ascent up the stairs of my house that night, your head in the crook of my arm the following morning. Women like you did not like men like me. And I …
No. There’s no defence for it. None. I took advantage. Plain and simple.
But I’m glad at least that you and Poppy have had a chance to get to know each other in relatively normal circumstances, not in the glare of a police operation, not in the strip-lit office of the social services, just as a child and her grandmother, sharing breakfast, going shopping, eating dinner with your family. I hope this means that in the days that follow Poppy will be seamlessly assimilated into the Mack family. I’ve given her the bare bones of the truth. I will leave it to you to decide how much more she needs to know. And remember, this house and everything in it belongs to Poppy. She’ll more than pay her own way in life.
But that brings me to the final, and in some ways, most compelling reason for me not going straight to the police back in May of this year. You’ll notice if you look through the window to your right that there is a bed in the garden, newer, higher than the others. Do you see? At the very back? I dug it out in early November, just before I met you.
Noelle Donnelly is under there.