Samantha was away for the weekend with her sister, and he’d dropped Rachel off at her friend’s house for a daylong pool party first thing. So, having put Lucy to bed, Josh found himself unexpectedly alone. It was a hot Saturday in June, and for once he had no daughter to occupy. His time was his own. He thought about taking the paper into the garden, or heading up to his study and getting through some of the emails he’d been avoiding for weeks. But the day had seemed too good for either of those and he felt his free hours too much of a gift. Especially falling, as they had, on a weekend when not just Samantha, but also Tony was away.
Perhaps he’d sent Maddy a text then deleted it. Or maybe he hadn’t even risked that, and had just gone around and surprised her. Their house was, after all, so close. However he’d done it, with text, phone call, or on the spur of the moment, Josh had gone. For only a short amount of time, perhaps. For less than an hour, certainly, but still, he’d gone. Leaving Lucy asleep in her room upstairs, and unaware of the hallway’s shifting air drawing the back door open, he’d pulled the front door closed, and gone.
And now he was back, his body evacuated by the urgency of their sex, a boyish thrill of truancy ebbing to a pragmatic efficiency. It had been a risk, but now taken he must restore the day’s rhythm and elide the minutes of his absence. Finishing his water, Josh stripped off his T-shirt, put it in the washing machine, and headed upstairs to take a shower.
He saw Lucy’s hair first, blonde against the red. For a few seconds he didn’t understand. But as each stair revealed more of her — her closed eyes, her ridden-up pyjama top, her pale belly — Josh realised he was looking at his daughter, motionless before him.
For a long time he just held her, rocking her against his chest on the stairs, feeling the warmth leave her skin. The coroner’s report would say this was regrettable. That the body should not have been moved. The police, too, questioned Josh as to why he’d laid Lucy out on the sofa downstairs and hadn’t left her as he’d found her. Although the report stated she’d most likely died instantly — from either the contusion to the back of her head or the break in her neck — there was a chance, however slim, that Lucy, had she not been moved, might have been saved. But Josh knew they were wrong. He’d known, as soon as he’d touched her, that his daughter was dead. Which is why he’d held her like that, tight against his bare chest, so he might harvest the last of her heat, so he might feel the blood and skin he and Samantha had made, that they’d known since she was a baby, cool against his own.
The police were the first to arrive, a squad car with two officers. Soon afterwards the ambulance Josh had called pulled up alongside. A group of shirtless boys on bikes gathered down the street, sucking on brightly coloured ices. Across the road, a woman three floors up, resting her folded arms on a windowsill, called back to her husband to come and look. A few doors down, an elderly man, an ex — classics professor, had been reading his newspaper in the sun at the front of his house. Standing up, paper in hand, he’d watched along with the shirtless boys and the woman at the window as the paramedics had carried out a stretcher, a blanket bunched at its centre. Later that day, the sun having moved on from his garden, he’d looked up again while folding his deckchair and seen police photographers ferrying their equipment into the house.
At the police station a detective sergeant, a young woman still in her twenties, took a statement from Josh. At the same time, down the corridor in a room with two desk fans turning at full speed, an officer from the family protection unit ran background checks on Lucy’s name and the Nelsons’ address. Halfway through his statement, Josh, still numb, had become angry. Why were they questioning him? She’d fallen. It was an accident. Did they really think he’d kill his own daughter? The detective sergeant had let him rant, watching him with tired eyes. Going to the corner of the room, she’d poured him a cup of tea and asked him if he wanted any sugar, and if he wanted to call Lucy’s mother. Or they could send a female constable. It was up to him. As she brought him his tea Josh had nodded silently and then begun crying again.
Samantha was getting ready for dinner when she took the call. She’d just showered and still had her hair in a towel. Martha was already downstairs, waiting for her in the hotel bar. At first Josh wouldn’t tell her why she had to come home. But she’d insisted. His voice was cracked, submerged, and thick. She’d never heard him sound like that before. When he couldn’t finish his sentences for sobbing, she’d simply asked him, “Rachel or Lucy, Josh? Rachel or Lucy?” Which is when he’d told her. Although she didn’t move, Samantha had felt herself fall from a great height. Holding the phone close to her ear, she, too, had begun to cry, as Josh repeated down the line, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Martha drove her, straight to the police station to be with Josh. A policewoman had already visited the parents of Rachel’s friend and explained. Yes, the friend’s mother had said, holding her hand to her mouth and nodding, pale. Yes, of course Rachel could stay for the night.
Samantha and Josh returned home in a taxi, holding each other as they walked the short path to their front door. By the time Michael had seen Josh in the garden they’d already been back for more than an hour. Samantha had gone straight to bed, where she’d cried herself to sleep. But Josh hadn’t been able to sleep so had paced the house instead, trying to understand. He’d opened a bottle of wine and drunk two glasses in quick succession, then he’d gone out into the garden, where, unaware of Michael watching him from above, he’d wept before the dark waters of the pond, hitting his hand again and again against the fence as he slid to his knees, succumbing to his tears.
―
Michael couldn’t sleep that night, either. He’d come back from the Heath intending to tell Samantha and Josh everything. But the sight of Josh crying had flushed all resolve from his body. He’d remained by the window for as long as Josh had stayed by the fence, and had only moved away once he’d seen him get up and walk back towards the house.
Going to his bathroom, Michael had undressed and showered, standing with his head under the beating water until the tank ran cold. As he’d watched the dirt wash from his knees and swill down the plughole he’d thought, briefly, about killing himself. It was too overwhelming. The vision of Caroline, Lucy’s falling, Josh’s weeping. He wanted to leave it, escape. But then somewhere deeper, below thought, he’d recognised this impulse as chemical, a passing reaction he must let work through its process. Which it did, the urge subsiding as Michael dried himself then went into his bedroom to try and work out what it was he should do next.
Of one thing he was now certain. He could not confess. He could not tell Samantha and Josh he’d been inside their house. As he’d lain on his bed through the rest of the night, his eyes open in the dark, this is what Michael repeatedly told himself. That now, having set his course in those seconds on the landing, and then in his leaving, there was nothing to be gained from further accumulation of anger or grief. Lucy was gone. He had seen her die. But he had not killed her. He had witnessed, but he had not committed. Telling her parents would not bring her back to life. It would only, most likely, take him away from theirs, exactly when he might be of most help to them, as a friend and a neighbour.
Michael knew this logic seemed perverted and was also dependent upon him not being caught, on a trace of his presence not being found in the house. And even if he did escape suspicion, he was so disoriented he didn’t know if he’d be able to justify his thinking in another hour’s time, let alone the next morning. But he did know, in a bald sense, that it was true. He had to be practical, to think, now that it had happened, now that Lucy was dead, how the most good might be done.