I knew Daisy wasn’t everything she tried to present to me, which was why I needed to search for evidence, to prove my case, prove that she wasn’t this golden glamorous, innocent woman she was portraying herself to be.

I thought about the papers, everything I had discovered about her and printed out. I had thrown them in the fire days ago, when I realised it had all been for nothing.

I showed it all to Ben, all the news reports, the evidence of the lives she had destroyed and when his head fell into his hands I thought, finally, he would see her for the manipulative girl I knew she was. He would end this silly infatuation with her. But after a few moments he sat up straight and looked at me shook his head and said, ‘You are not my mother.’

He looked at me with such repulsion. I couldn’t control what happened next.

66

DAISY

I stood and breathed heavily on the first step. There was a thin wooden banister about three steps down. It was pitch-black but I could see a thin sliver of light stretched out across the floor at the bottom. I needed to find my baby, I had no idea where Annie was, an urge to find my son overwhelmed me, the need to be with him was overpowering, yet the sounds I was hearing that had been flooding the house and my mind for months were driving me down the steps. Fear pulsated through every vein. I looked back into the kitchen before I tentatively took the second step.

I stretched my hand to the right and found a light switch. I flicked it and the basement was suddenly illuminated by a pale yellow sea of light. My legs felt as though they would give way at any moment and although I knew in my mind what I thought I might possibly find, I really didn’t want to know.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, a vast space stretched out in front of me and to the right of the staircase, the room continued round the corner. I took my final step, onto the cold concrete floor, looked to my left and saw a canvas sheet covering up a large pointy object. Next to it was a box that said ‘Christmas decorations’ written neatly in black pen. There was foam coming out in pyramid shapes attached to all the walls from ceiling to floor. The basement was sound proofed. I guess it had always been this way from when Ben used to use it to play his instruments. All along the wall to the left were stacked boxes and an old dusty-looking wooden bookshelf. I left the security of the last step and walked around the corner to the right. The smell hit me but I still couldn’t see anything else until I was still further around the corner, practically under the stairs I had just walked down. Then I saw something – something that initially my eyes could not accept. In the furthest corner there were several blankets piled on top of one another. There was a bulge in the blankets. An obvious body shape. And from the bottom of the blankets came a chain which was attached to an old iron radiator. I let out a gasp and whatever was underneath moved. It started to sit up, its face partially covered by the blankets and by a mass of hair. An arm came out of the blankets stretching its way to me. My feet felt as though they were stuck to the ground. I could neither run nor walk towards the stairs or towards the body. With pain now resonating through my pelvis and into my legs I bent down on all fours and moved my hands and legs one at a time, the position eased the pain in my abdomen, until I was so close that my face was just inches away from a nose… a mouth. My brain was refusing to make the connection, but there was no mistaking those deep brown eyes that were staring back at me.