‘I don’t want you talking about our issues with a complete stranger.’
‘I’m perfectly capable of making my own decisions without needing your approval first,’ Gail countered.
‘So my opinion doesn’t count? But when does it in this bloody house?’
Gail muttered something Sinéad couldn’t quite hear before, without warning, there came the unmistakable sound of a slap. Sinéad’s eyes opened wide.
Anthony had just hit his wife.
Sinéad’s immediate reaction was to burst into that room and put her combat training to good use, breaking the handAnthony had used to hurt her friend with. But Karczewski’s words repeated in her head. ‘Don’t put yourself in situations you don’t need to be involved in,’ he’d warned. ‘The more you risk your own safety, the more you risk the programme.’
While Daniel had fallen short of physical abuse, he’d made up for it by slowly chipping away at her morale until it had been completely eroded. Could she really stand idly by and watch another woman suffer at the hands of a bully?
The programme comes first, she reminded herself.You have to walk away.
Reluctantly, Sinéad had little choice but to listen to her gut. She quietly opened the back door and made her way across the garden, taking a shortcut over the fence and through the field of towering wind turbines, growing angrier and angrier at her inertia.
Arriving back at the cottage, Sinéad turned on the radio to quieten her shame, jabbing at buttons until she found a classic pop station. She turned the volume up as high as the dial allowed. The colourful notes that usually surrounded them were notably diminished. She hadn’t seen so many dull greys, blacks and browns floating around a room in a long time.
She also fretted about baby Taylor living in a house where domestic violence was the norm. That made her thoughts return to Lilly. She still recalled with clarity every pore in her daughter’s beautiful face.
She hadn’t been the easiest of newborns. The first week had passed without issue; she fed little and often, slept on and off for around eighteen hours a day and only cried when her belly craved warm milk. But by the middle of week two, the routine Sinéad was beginning to take for granted began to fray. Lilly cried with alarming regularity, for hours at a time and for no apparent reason. Nothing pacified her; not cuddles, food, dark rooms, park walks,fresh nappies or the vibrations of Sinéad’s moving car. Convinced she was sick, twice Sinéad insisted their GP examine her daughter but he found nothing medically wrong.
By the third week of little to no sleep, an exhausted Sinéad begged a reticent Daniel for help. Instead of offering much-needed support, he questioned why she wasn’t able to understand her baby’s needs when other mothers could. He also reminded her that because she was breastfeeding, there was little he could do to assist. Finally, he convinced her that mother and daughter might settle more easily if they slept in the nursery.
It was Daniel who had found his daughter’s lifeless body that New Year’s morning. Lilly was still in the crook of her mother’s arm, face up and with Sinéad’s nipple in her mouth. Sinéad awoke to the sound of Daniel yelling and grabbing the baby from where she had fallen asleep in the armchair feeding her.
Unable to comprehend what had happened, Sinéad begged paramedics to bring her daughter back to life as they carried out chest compressions on her tiny frame. But it was too late. A fast-tracked coroner’s report revealed that Lilly had likely choked to death on her exhausted mother’s milk.
‘I don’t care what the inquest rules: we’ll tell everyone it was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,’ Daniel said. ‘We don’t need anyone knowing you killed her.’
His words cut deeply. He insisted that Sinéad register the birth and death alone, suggesting it might help her to accept her culpability. But Sinéad was already well aware of what she had done. And following the funeral – a private ceremony with just the two of them in attendance – he point-blank refused to talk about his daughter again.
But the accidental death of a child, especially at the hands of a parent, became all-consuming. There were nosupport groups for women like her, no online forums she could join to talk about her guilt. She trawled the internet instead, bookmarking news stories about family members who had mistakenly killed their children in other ways. It was a scab she couldn’t stop picking at. Over and over she read about grandparents running over their grandchildren in vehicles, accidental drownings in baths and pools, medication overdoses and babies forgotten about and left inside cars during heatwaves. She was no better than any of them.
Her compulsion to pick at her eyelashes began in the aftermath of Lilly’s death. Each time she assumed she could feel no more pain, she would pluck at them to remind herself there wasalwaysmore pain to be felt if she dug hard enough. What started deliberately soon became a habit, and she would stare at her reflection every morning and evening, scanning for regrowth. The deeper the root, the more the sting, and the more satisfaction she felt. She was not alone, she discovered; many people were compelled to do it often in response to stressful situations. The NHS’s website even gave her condition a name – trichotillomania.
The grief following Lilly’s death eased over time but the guilt did not. Daniel’s unwillingness to try and ease her burden resulted in her continuing her preoccupation until eventually, her eyelashes gave up and stopped growing back. He told her many times that without them, she resembled a reptile that was ready to cry at any given moment. Part of it wasn’t far from the truth, because her eyes were constantly weeping as she no longer had a barrier from dust, grit or pollen when she blinked.
Sinéad begged Daniel to sell their apartment but he refused; his compromise being that while they were out for the day, he’d arranged for a removals company to take away Lilly’s cot, changing table, wardrobe, Moses basket, clothes and soft toys. No keepsakes remained.
For months, Sinéad scoured local charity shops hoping but failing to find anything that had once been touched by her baby. Even now, miles away from home in Edzell, she struggled to pass a charity shop without taking a quick glance through the window at the baby clothes hanging up on the rail.
Chapter 36
EMILIA
The recorded voice memo came from a withheld number and appeared soon after midnight. Emilia turned down the volume of her phone and pressed it against her ear, just to be sure Ted couldn’t hear anything from his suite next door.
The caller’s accent was male and British but he possessed no regional accent. She was sure that it was synthetic. Such computer-generated voices were near-perfect in their diction, but were let down by their intonation. Emilia, however, could spot the devil in the detail, even if she didn’t know how she had acquired such a skill.
‘Nine p.m. tonight at the Paquis Lighthouse,’ was all the voice said. She went online for directions.
It had taken all Emilia’s powers of persuasion before Ted allowed her to join him on his forthcoming business trip. He’d claimed prolonged travel might have a negative effect on her health so soon after her car accident, so she had sought written approval and a Fit to Fly certificate from an independent medical consultant to prove him wrong. It meant Ted had little excuse but to book her a ticket.
By breakfast, their commercial flight from London’s Luton Airport to Switzerland’s Genève Aéroport had landed. And once Emilia and Ted had bypassed the usualcustoms channels and been escorted by airport security staff to an awaiting autonomous vehicle, they were en route to their Lake Geneva hotel. Ted’s attention was diverted towards the contents of his tablet and the programme of meetings as Emilia nervously prepared her part of the plan.
‘Don’t you get fed up of being watched all the time?’ she asked, turning to look at the car behind containing his security personnel.
