‘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 so very dangerous.’

A coldness spread through Clara. ‘How dangerous?’ She looked at Oliver. ‘When you said she went to prison, what was it for?’

28

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 been sitting idle, waiting for its touchpaper to be lit. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I try my hardest not to dwell on the reasons why any more. 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 paralysed. Should I talk to Hannah first, try to dissuade her from her plan, whatever that might be? I needed to find out what she was intending to do. When she ended the call to Emily, I waited in the kitchen for her to come down, my head in turmoil, until I 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 make-up 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 I 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.’