“Pictures?” Clara asked, feeling sick. “What pictures?”
Oliver pulled his phone from his pocket. “This is the last one that Hannah sent us.”
“Let me see that.” Tom’s face drained of color as he took the phone from his father and stared down at its screen. Wordlessly he passed it to Clara. It was a picture of Luke. He had a large and vivid bruise across his face, a split lip, and horribly pale skin behind his scars, his eyes staring glassily at the lens.
Clara gasped in horror as she swiped to the next photo. It showed Luke’s bound arms, covered in hundreds of small, weeping knife wounds. “Oh no,” she whispered, “oh God.”
“We’ve been waiting to hear from her, to tell us what to do next,” Rose said. “We’re so frightened.” Fresh tears fell from her eyes. “She’s dangerous, Tom. She’s really very dangerous.”
A coldness spread through Clara. “How dangerous?” She looked at Oliver. “When you said she went to prison, what was it for?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
CAMBRIDGESHIRE, 1997
They say that personality disorders, including sociopathy, can come about due to a mixture of biology and circumstance. A neurological malfunction, often inherited, that can be exacerbated by trauma in childhood. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it over the years—in fact I’ve thought of little else—but I still don’t know why Hannah became the person that she did. Perhaps she did inherit her mother’s psychiatric issues; perhaps the discovery of where she came from that day, aged seven, detonated a bomb that had been sitting idle, waiting for its touch paper to be lit. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I try my hardest not to dwell on the reasons why anymore. I last saw Hannah—I no longer refer to her as my daughter—over twenty years ago. I never want to see her face again.
—
After I overheard Hannah on the phone to Emily that day, pretending to be “Becky,” I was thrown into a panic. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I knew I should call Rose to warn her, but I felt paralyzed. Should I talk to Hannah first, try to persuade her from her plan, whatever that might be? I needed to find out what she was intending to do. When she put the phone down to Emily, I waited in the kitchen for her to come down, my head in turmoil, until sure enough, I finally heard her door open and a few seconds later her tread on the stairs.
She glanced at me as she entered the kitchen, but as usual said nothing, coldly ignoring me as she went to the cupboard and started rooting around for food. I can still see her now. She was wearing black leggings and a T-shirt that might once have been white, her face a mess of last night’s makeup that she hadn’t bothered to wipe off. Yet still her beauty made me catch my breath. I thought again of the strange, fake voice she’d used on the phone, how she’d called herself Becky, and shuddered. At last I steeled myself and cleared my throat. “Hannah?”
She straightened up, a packet of biscuits in her hand. “What?”
I swallowed hard and braced myself. How had I become so afraid of my own daughter? “I know you’ve been meeting Emily Lawson,” I said. “I overheard you on the phone with her this morning.”
For a split second I saw surprise register on her face, followed by a moment of absolute silence, and then she did something that I hadn’t expected her to do in a thousand years: she started to cry. As I watched, amazed, the tears rolling down her face, she put the biscuits down and came over to where I was sitting at the table, then took the seat opposite mine and, putting her head on her arms, began to sob.
Funny to think that I still loved her then, that the sight of her in pain could make my heart twist in sympathy as though it were my own that was breaking. “Oh, Hannah,” I said. “Oh, my darling, what is it?” I reached across the table and took hold of her hand. It was the first time she’d let me touch her in years. “Tell me, please tell me what this is all about.”
It took her a while to compose herself. When she did, she wiped her eyes and said in a voice so small and desolate that it brought a lump to my throat, “I just want them to love me, my real family, I mean. I want to know them, to understand where I come from.” Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “Ever since I found out about my real mother and father, I’ve felt so confused.”
I was astonished. This was the first time she’d ever brought up what she’d overheard all those years before. “I had no idea you felt like this,” I stammered.
And then, suddenly, and to my horror, a wide smirk broke across her face. “Jesus, you’re stupid,” she said.
As I recoiled, she snatched her hand away, then slowly shook her head as though dumbfounded. “You actually bought that, didn’t you?” She laughed loudly, a harsh, ugly sound. “I always knew you were a fucking idiot, Beth,” she went on, “but I didn’t know you were quite this retarded.”
She got up and, walking around the table toward me, leaned down and put her face so close to mine that I could smell the cigarettes on her breath. “What I actually want
