Page 88 of Darling Girls

Jessica shrugged. ‘Not to my knowledge. But after that day we never heard much more about it.’

‘Wow.’ Anna appeared gratifyingly appalled, eyes wide as she shook her head. ‘Okay, let’s recap . . . You reported Miss Fairchild’s abuse of Amy to the cops, but they found no sign of her in the house and no record that she existed. Then they found a doll with her name on it and decided . . . what?’

‘That Amy was a figment of my imagination brought on by childhood trauma,’ Jessica said. ‘My therapist thought that Amy was the little girl inside me, the one who yearned to be loved and cared for.’

‘And they asserted that all three of you had the same delusion? And you believed this?’

Anna sounded incredulous, as if they’d been stupid for going along with it. Maybe they had. While it wouldn’t have been the first instance in history of three different people imagining the same thing, it was extraordinarily rare. Jessica had often suspected that, faced with three adolescent girls who swore blind the child existed, the therapist had been forced to dig deep to find a plausible explanation.

Alicia shrugged. ‘Everyone said the same thing. The police. The social workers. Our therapists. Everyone we trusted. And given that there wasn’t a single shred of evidence that Amy was real, what were we supposed to think?’

‘You never considered the possibility that your foster mother may have killed her and hidden both her body and any sign that there’d been an infant in the house?’

‘No,’ Jessica said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because that would’ve meant that Amy was dead.’

Anna was quiet for a moment. ‘But now,’ she said, ‘a little girl’s body has been found underneath the house.’

‘Yes.’

She frowned deeply, fiddling with a locket around her neck.

‘What is it?’ Norah asked.

‘I was just thinking.’ Anna shook her head. ‘If this body turns out to be Amy, it will be a monumental cock-up for the cops in Port Agatha. When it comes out, it’s bound to cause a political shitstorm.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Alicia said.

‘Maybe not,’ Anna replied, sitting back in her chair. ‘But I guaranteetheyhave.’

THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST

‘By the time I turned fourteen,’ I tell Dr Warren, ‘I’d noticed John was looking at me differently. He’d comment on even the most modest of my clothes, calling them sluttish. He talked about me being a young woman and having to be mindful of men’s sinful thoughts – as if I could control them. He watched closely while I cleaned – too closely. Sometimes he’d ask me to go back and redo something that required me to bend over. It was revolting.’

Dr Warren tries to look aghast, but his exhilaration shines through.

‘Mum noticed it too. Several times, I caught her watching him watching me. It made me hate her even more than him. It was around this time that John started visiting me in the basement. Whenever it happened, I thought about my mother upstairs. Sitting in her chair or washing John’s underclothes while her husband defiled her daughter. She knew. She must have known.

‘I didn’t want it to happen, let me be absolutely clear about that. Not for a single solitary moment. But when I thought about how foolish it made my mother look, how humiliating it was for her and the pain it would cause . . . it helped a little. It gave me the strength to endure it.’

Dr Warren leans forward with his elbows on his knees like a child at the movies. His eyes are hooded, his cheeks flushed. ‘John sexually assaulted you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you blamed your mother for that too?’

I nod. ‘It was her job to protect me from monsters. He was just the monster, doing what monsters did.’

Dr Warren writes something on his notepad. I wonder if he was quoting me for his thesis on mother–daughter issues.

‘I had just turned fifteen when I realised I was pregnant.’

Dr Warren’s jaw drops.

‘It was the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me. John had locked me in the basement for twenty-four hours without food and water just for answering back – what would he do when he found out I was pregnant? Fear of him finding out occupied most of my thoughts, but I was surprised to notice another emotion cropping up alongside this. Pleasure. Not about the baby; I was excited because I’d finally found a way to cause my mother even more pain and humiliation.