Dedication

For my mother, Mary

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS GO TO the following people, without whom the book would not exist.

Madeleine Milburn, for her unwavering support, brilliant advice and so much more. Many thanks also to the wonderful, talented team at the MM agency.

For their excellent guidance and supremely wise editorial input, and for steering the book toward the market with such passion and professionalism: Manpreet Grewal and the team at HQ; Jennifer Lambert and all at HarperCollins Canada; Chelsey Emmelhainz for her early input; Matt, Melissa, and the entire team at Crooked Lane Books.

To my first readers: Jennifer Usher, Mel Sellors, Chloë Kempton, Kitty Fordham, Alison Dunne, Mary Reddaway. Big kisses to all of you wonderful people. To Jenny Parsons, for medical advice and guidance. All omissions, mistakes, and examples of willful misrepresentation are my own.

To my supervisors at Bath Spa: Fay Weldon, CJ Skuse, and most especially Tracy Brain. Your input was invaluable: wise, crucial, and transformative.

To my children, who are the absolute best.

To Jonathan Golding, who is always there, ready to listen to all of my nonsense.

CHAPTER

1

She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,

And over the sand at the sea;

And her eyes are set in a stare;

And anon there breaks a sigh,

And anon there drops a tear,

From a sorrow-clouded eye,

And a heart sorrow-laden,

A long, long sigh;

For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden

And the gleam of her golden hair.

—Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman,”1849

NOW

Leonie

Friday, December 21

LEONIE PRESSES HER palm to the outside of the shop window. The glass is cold; the fat little star of her hand leaves an imprint in condensation when she pulls it away. She laughs and slaps her hand back on the window, stamping another and another, a bit like when she does potato printing at the kitchen table, the potatoes soon left aside in favor of dipping her hands straight in the paints. She concentrates on tracing the outlines of the handprints with a fingertip, before they fade away.

“Mamma,” she says. “Come look. Me do painting.”

Behind her, a handbag stands abandoned on the pavement. She turns around, toddles over, picks up the bag. She looks up and down the street, her whole body turning first one way, then the other. There is no one else there. The chill wind blows in her face, tightening the skin on her cheeks and almost toppling her, almost taking her pink bobble hat from her head. Two bobbles; like a teddy bear’s ears.

“Mamma?”

Leonie is still, wearing a small frown. Then, she upends the handbag onto the slabs. Nappies and wipes fall out, nappy bags are whisked up the street by the wind. There is a coin purse, a collection of receipts, a bunch of keys attached to a smooth pebble with a hole in it. Picking up the pebble, she shakes the bunch so that they rattle, then drops the lot back on the ground. A fruit bar, half finished and wound into its torn wrapper is what she reaches for next. She has it in her mouth when she hears the bell on the shop. The heavy door creaks as it opens, spilling yellow light and warmth onto her fingers, now almost blue with cold, that peep out beyond the cuffs of her coat.

Though it isn’t late, it’s nearly dark; the shortest day of the year. The girl toddles toward the shop’s light, toward the Christmas tree just inside, past the stranger at the door who has stepped aside to let her in, who is saying, “Where’s your mummy?”

Leonie reaches for a bauble, a shiny thing, sparkling. There’s a chocolate bell too, and she drops the fruit bar to take it in her hand.

“Whose child is this?” calls the stranger as the man from behind the counter comes forward, rubbing his hands together, his eyes wide with concern.

“Mamma?” says Leonie to the shopkeeper, recognizing nothing but the worry in his expression. Her bottom lip wobbles in uncertainty. Then, her grip on the foil-covered decoration is lost, and it hits the floor tiles, smashing into pieces that scatter from the wrapping as it splits. There is stillness as she looks at all the bits in turn, her face registering surprise. This, seemingly, is the most upsetting thing. She shuts her eyes to cry, face to the ceiling, fists clenched, mouth open and revealing eight perfect teeth.

The customer crouches, hovering his hand near the toddler, saying, “Shh, it’s okay, don’t worry. We’ll find Mamma.”

Both of the adults expect a loud noise and brace themselves for it. But when the cry comes, it is a faint, keening whisper, like distant wind. The child’s face is posed in a scream, but there is barely a sound.

The two men exchange a glance, agreeing that something is wrong, but at this moment there are bigger problems than the strangeness of this cry. The customer starts to pat the toddler on the shoulder, the pads of his fingers barely making contact, and all the time he’s glancing around, talking to the shopkeeper, saying, “Did you see who she was with?” Leonie opens her eyes and screams silently into his face. The soundlessness of it makes it worse somehow than if the scream were deafening. The man stands, snatches another chocolate decoration from a branch and gently takes one of the child’s trembling fists in his hand. He unpeels the small fingers, places the confection on her upturned palm. Her mouth shuts, and she inspects the red Santa figure, turning it over, searching for how to open it. She hiccups once. Snot runs down her chin.

The bell on the door rings as the shopkeeper yanks it open. He steps outside and looks both ways, then up at the darkening sky and finally down, at the handbag spilling its contents. He walks forward, nudges the pile of nappies with a toe, notes the keys, the packet of wipes. He’s looking for a phone, or a wallet with something like ID in it, but there’s nothing. The coin purse contains only cash. He picks up the empty handbag, weighs it in his hand. He finds a pocket at the front and unzips it. Inside is what he thinks is a rock but on closer inspection is a seashell.

One or two snowflakes swirl in the wind, landing on the concrete and making wet speckles. In the distance, the seals call to each other across the waves, making a sound like human screams, but other than a slight jerk to the head, the man doesn’t react. If you live here it’s a familiar sound, the seal song, like that of the waves and the gulls.

The sea sighs as the tide licks the shore, sucking the surface of the beach into new shapes: gentle, curving undulations, different from yesterday’s, that will be different tomorrow and with every tide that turns.

Just out of sight, a small pile of clothes, buried in haste in the sand, is covered up by the advancing water. Gentle eddies loosen the folds of the fabric, so that a parka slowly unfurls like a flower opening in the darkness. Soon the sea will probe further, uncovering the heel of one boot. Later, the clothes will be completely removed from their rudimentary hiding place by the many strong hands of the currents. Later still they will be scattered on seven different shores. The other boot will remain here, wedging itself between two rocks, unseen by anyone until the litter pickers come in the spring.

CHAPTER

2

NOW

Bathwater

Friday, December 21

THE WATER FILLS the bathtub slowly, over a number of hours. As it does so, the body of the man begins to float, rising with the level of the liquid, the small amount of fat and the air in his body keeping him on the surface for now. Falling from the tap, the water is clear. As the thin stream enters the tub, it mixes with the man’s blood so that the color of the bathwater varies from pale rose at his feet, to plumes of bright red near his head, where pulse pressure shoots the blood from the wound in regular bursts. It takes a long time, but when the bath is full, the solution finds its way to the overflow, and from there it trickles through the many meters of pipework to the sewers deep below the block of flats.

In the bathtub, as well as the man and the water and the blood, there is a towel. The towel is drawn toward the overflow until, at last, a combination of the man’s legs and the bunching of the thick fabric blocks the hole completely. No one is there to turn off the tap; the bath keeps filling, and keeps filling, so that soon, like a bloody version of the magic porridge pot it goes over, flooding the bathroom, searching out the edges of the vinyl, breaking through, soaking into the floorboards, pooling in the cavity under the floor. There’s a layer of sealant there and a layer of soundproofing, but the water finds the lowest point. It accumulates, becomes heavier, weakens the plasterboard. It only needs a tiny gap, a pinprick, to break through.

In the flat below, Mrs. Stefanidis is preparing to eat her lunch, a small cheese sandwich on white bread. She feels rather than hears something drop, disrupting the air close to her face, but when she places her hands on the tabletop and feels around, there appears to be nothing amiss. After a momentary frown, her fingers find the plate and raise the sandwich to her lips, the macular degeneration that has reduced her vision to a sliver of peripheral preventing her from noticing the spreading pink circle that has wetted the middle of the bread, the droplet of blood and bathwater that landed there, that came from the ceiling above. As she opens her mouth, another fat sphere drops and bursts, this time on her hand, and she puts the sandwich down.

Something in the ceiling gives. It starts to come faster, dripping like a broken gutter in the middle of the kitchen table, spattering the walls, flecks of it on the white net curtains, on the clean cups that stand on the draining board. Mrs. Stefanidis feels under the sink for the bucket, locates the leak and places the vessel just so, to catch it. She dries her hands on her apron, then reaches into her apron pocket to phone for the maintenance man. Using the specially enlarged buttons on her handset, she speed-dials Terry’s number, listens to it ringing, hopes he won’t mind coming to help her; there’s no one else to ask. On the table, the bucket is filling, slowly but surely. Soon it will be too heavy for her to lift. The apron she wears is made of crisp cotton. She doesn’t see the pinkish prints her fingers have made there.

CHAPTER

3

NOW

Ruby

Friday, December 21

WHEN RUBY TURNED the corner, she knew she was in deep shit. The plan had been perfect, on paper, but of course they’d realized that the timings were tight, with no room for trains being late. Stupid, then, to think the bloody thing would be on time on this day, of all days. She hurried along the street toward the shop, where blue lights flashed repeatedly from the police car parked outside. If the police were here, it meant that something terrible had happened. What had Constance done—why had they been called? No one was supposed to know about this, a quiet handover of an unknown child on a deserted small-town street, arranged carefully so that the mother could slip away, unnoticed. If the police were involved, then it was all over before they’d even had a chance. Was Constance desperate enough to risk leaving Leonie before Ruby got there? From Constance’s state of mind in recent days, Ruby thought she knew the answer to that. Distressing possibilities ran through Ruby’s mind: Leonie crushed under the wheels of a car; Leonie drowned trying to follow her mother into the sea. Ten minutes late, that’s all it was, and it wasn’t her fault—it was the bloody trains.

Ruby’s lungs were burning; she’d been running for what seemed like hours. But it was only ten minutes or so. Hardly any time. Enough time to die, came the unwanted thought, before she could stop it.

An officer stepped out of the shop, and the sight of the police uniform caused a sickening jolt in Ruby. She thought for a split second that it could be Joanna, before shaking off the notion with logic: Jo lived and worked in Sheffield, fifty miles away. Also, Joanna no longer wore the uniform; as a detective she wasn’t on the front line.

“Good evening, madam,” said the officer. “Can I help you?”

Through the gaps around the flyers in the shop window, Ruby could see inside, where the shopkeeper was lifting Leonie onto the counter.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Ruby, thinking, Is she okay? Is she hurt? And she tried to get past the police officer, reaching a hand to push open the door. The officer moved slightly, to block her.

“I’m afraid you can’t go in at the moment. There’s been an incident.”

Next to the counter, another police officer held the handbag that Constance used as a changing bag, the one she would have handed to Ruby along with the child. He searched through it, placing the items together in a pile as he took them out, one by one. There was no sign, inside or outside the shop, of Constance herself. Ruby became aware of the sound of the waves behind her, and wanted to turn and scan the water for the boat that Constance had said was coming to fetch her, but didn’t dare to do so. Even if it were there, in the descending dark Ruby might not have seen it: from the stories Constance had told, her family life was very basic. Ruby imagined them like seafaring Amish, without electricity or modern technology, still living in the way they’d been doing a hundred years ago, or more.

There was a strange, almost musical cry from far offshore, whipped away by the wind as soon as she heard it. Might have been a ship’s horn. Might have been the wind itself, whistling through a gap in the rocks where the land met the sea.

She glared at the police officer. “Can you move, please? I need to get inside. That’s my baby.” My baby, she thought, and in that moment, she realized it was true. Perhaps not biologically, but nevertheless true in the only way that mattered. She’s my baby now. As the thought settled on her, she stood straighter, feeling proud to claim it.

Ruby craned her neck to see, caught the lost look in Leonie’s eyes, and tried to take another step toward the door. The child hadn’t noticed her yet, and Ruby so wanted to give her a cuddle, tell her everything was going to be okay. She couldn’t get past; the police woman was still blocking her way.

“You’re the mother?” asked the officer.

“Yes,” she said. Ruby’s voice was high and quiet, and she worried she’d made her reply sound too much like a question. She cleared her throat. “Can I go in, please? She’ll be scared.” How long had she been in the care of the police? It was only ten minutes. Maybe twenty. No time at all.

The officer moved forward in a way that made Ruby step back. “If you could come this way please, madam. There’ll be someone along shortly to talk to you.” With arms held out slightly, the officer ushered Ruby away from the shop, toward the patrol car.

“Can’t I see her?” said Ruby, trying to see over her shoulder through the glass. “She’s okay, isn’t she? Is she safe?” How to explain it? Even ten minutes is unforgivable. “I’m so sorry—I let go of her hand for one second, and she ran off. I lost sight of her.”

The guilt was crushing. Sharp tears formed in the corners of Ruby’s eyes, her throat swelled painfully. She glanced at the expressionless face of the police officer, in which she could read nothing at all. No sympathy, no understanding. Then it hit her: it wasn’t just the blonde coloring, and the uniform—this person really reminded her of Joanna, and not in a good way. It was the cool, detached attitude, the way she was observing Ruby the way you would observe another species, an insect, or an alien.

“If you wouldn’t mind just waiting in the back of the vehicle,” said the officer. If you wouldn’t mind. There was clearly no choice whatsoever.

“Are you arresting me? I haven’t done anything wrong. It was a mistake. An accident.”

The officer opened the door of the patrol car and motioned for Ruby to get in. The police radio gave a crackle, and she moved to turn the volume down.

“Do you have children?” said Ruby.

But the officer simply repeated, “If you wouldn’t mind.”

It was probably best to do as she was told. Ruby climbed carefully into the back seat of the patrol car and sat there stiffly, pressing her knees together, staring at the headrest in front of her.

“Won’t be a moment, madam.”

When the door was shut, the darkness closed her in. The officer walked away, and Ruby scrabbled at the door, checking for an escape route, just in case. The handle slipped from her fingers as she pulled it; the thing was functionless, child-locked. That must have been a mistake. They weren’t supposed to keep her prisoner, were they? When she hadn’t done anything wrong?

Inside the shop she could just see the shopkeeper and the male police officer talking to each other. Like the windows, the glass door was plastered with posters and stickers, so only a sliver of the faces could be seen, quick glimpses of hands gesticulating. When the officer who had put her in the car reached the shop door and opened it, there was a clear view of Leonie, sitting on the counter, eating pieces of chocolate from a nest of gold foil that had been placed next to her. A chocolate decoration. Someone must have opened it for her. Leonie was completely absorbed by the process, taking her time choosing a piece and grasping it delicately in her fingers, opening her mouth comically wide to get it in and, even before it was finished, returning her attention to the next selection. Ruby closed her eyes in relief. There were dirty streaks on the little face where she’d been crying, but Leonie was fine. That was really all that mattered. It was going to be okay.

The shop door closed, obscuring most of her view. She could see part of the back of the police woman as she talked to the other officer, then a slice of the male officer’s face as he lifted his radio and spoke into it. His eyes slid toward Ruby then, though she didn’t think he’d be able to see her: the light was in her favor. She smoothed her skirt and applied some lip balm, tried to control her breathing. This was the big test. She never imagined it would come so soon into the journey. Ruby wasn’t sure she was ready.

She took a long, slow breath. I am all that girl has in the world. I have to do this. I have to try. Outside there was a distant sound coming from the waves, loud and long and echoing round the bay. This time she knew what it was. The seals calling. She wondered what exactly they were saying. The lullaby came to mind, the one she’d learned from Constance that she often sang to Leonie: Ionn da, ionn do, ionn da, od-ar da. Constance had said it was called “The Seal Woman’s Joy.” The title seemed wrong, now, and in Ruby’s head the words sang out in a minor key.

Two cars pulled up: another police car, which parked by the sea wall opposite, and a big black utility vehicle that stopped right behind the car in which she was imprisoned. In the side mirror she saw a woman in a trouser suit exit the black car and go into the shop. After a while this woman came out again, holding Leonie’s small hand in hers, leading her away.

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