Occasionally Daisy asked questions, about Ben or Eve, or talked about police and hospitals, and when I could hear the worry heighten in her voice, I would increase the amount of the drugs, which would send the girl into a compliant state once more.

The swell to Daisy’s stomach was increasing day by day as there was barely anything of her anyway. I could almost feel the tiny bundle in my arms. It wasn’t going to be long now.

The pool arrived and I had already set it up in the dining room and looked at it daily and imagined the little purple bundle sliding out into the water, just as I had seen on the videos on YouTube. It was the perfectly natural way for babies to come into the world. Just like my Ben did.

Each week I had been ordering something from the internet to arrive.

I had showed the basic bits to Daisy, who had pulled her mouth into some sort of expression that neither indicated nonchalance nor excitement. But I had been secretly stashing away all the other little extra things, like mobiles, booties and cotton blankets.

This was what I was good at, being organised. I thought about Ben and for a moment I felt close to him again, as though he wasn’t far away. We had come so far and achieved so much together as a team.

I just hoped one day he would realise it as much as I did.

40

DAISY

It was a topsy-turvy world I was living in. I couldn’t stop saying the words. Topsy-turvy. They kept rolling around in my head. I couldn’t remember when I had ever used the words topsy-turvy before. But they seemed appropriate and they seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my head like two uninvited lodgers. Yet they were the only description of how I was feeling. What if they never went away? What if every day was spent with those two ridiculous words stuck in my head? At the thought of this my mouth became very dry and the pit of my stomach churned. My legs started to shake on autopilot. It wasn’t cold. In fact, it was too warm. So why was I shivering. I stood and looked out of the closed window. Below the sea was still and I could see the silhouette of a man and a dog in the distance. It was early, or so it seemed. The world had just been continuing around me and I had never felt so disconnected. I looked at the sand, the sea; the man in the distance and although I could see them, none of it felt real. It was all just… topsy-turvy.

I felt empty, even though I was brimming with new life.

Annie had promoted herself without any protest from me, to taking care of pretty much everything. She had told me there was no need to go for any scans or have appointments. It was a relief in a way, because since the day of the court, I had barely even stepped outside the front door. Patrick’s words still haunted me and without Ben here I felt terrified. Since Eve’s inquest result I felt the burden of her death even more heavily. It was an effort to do most things. Staying put felt right. I was safe here.