Little Things

Now, I'm no mastermind. I know I work for a government agency and some of my work is so secret that even I don't know what I'm doing half the time; but when it comes to single parenting, I'm convinced that it takes at least two people to make a success of that. Otherwise, the child just takes you over. You want what's best for them but then let them con you into letting them decide what that is and before you know it, you've lost control completely.

Maybe I didn't ask the right questions, or then again, maybe I was blinded by love into accepting everything she told me without question. Whatever my excuse, the fact remains that the clues were there for me to find; I just wasn't looking for them.

Like that first time she saw someone being strangled in a TV drama. She was still just a kid then and maybe I let her watch a little more adult television than I should have. But I put her wide eyed excitement down to nothing more sinsister than . . . well, than nothing really. I should have known that when a child gets excited when viewing such material, it's not the panicking loser of a victim it's identifying with, it's the exultant and powerful winner of a murderer, and this was still happening right under my nose on a regular basis. We watched many a cop show on TV together and as soon as it became obvious that a female character was about to be strangled, her sweet little mouth would open and she'd lick her lips. In my naivety, I put this down to harmless nervousness caused by being lost in the drama instead of seeing it for what it really was, ghoulish anticipation.

Her reading matter and dvd collection should have alerted me to the fact that these were precisely the sort of items you'd expect to be gracing the shelves and cupboards of any homicidal maniac taking their obsession seriously; but I didn't look. I didn’t look because my precious daughter trusted me not too and I made the stupid parental error of honouring that trust.

She didn't have friends, as I've already mentioned, but surely her total absence of interest in boys at least have aroused some degree of curiosity on my part. It didn’t. Okay, so I did speculated that she might be lesbian from time to time, but since I figured that if I were a woman, I'd be gay too, I saw this as no cause for concern. In fact, I saw it as none of my damn business and steered well clear of the topic.

Naturally, this all changed when I came home one day earlier than expected and found the body in Linda's bedroom. For one terrible, heart stopping moment, I thought it was Linda. She was lying face down, plus her hair was dark and of similar length to my daughters'. That red cord around the neck, I'd seen this before. It had been hanging in Linda's wardrobe and I'd assumed it was some sort of a belt. Maybe this was some solo asphyxiation game that had gone badly wrong. Maybe it wasn’t too late; maybe she wasn't dead. I rushed to the girl and rolled her floppy body over. It wasn't Linda. I was so relieved that I completely forgot about the "maybe it’s not too late, maybe she's not dead" bit for a minute or two. When I did finally bother to check, I found it was too late and she was most definitely dead. She was probably pretty when still breathing and was smartly dressed in a navy business suit, consisting of a jacket and a rather figure hugging tapered knee length skirt. She was also wearing a white blouse that had been torn open. One of her breasts was partially exposed above the top of her bra. I didn't know this girl at all and had no ready explanation as to why she should turn up dead in my home. She looked to be about the same age as Linda, so perhaps she was a friend of hers and maybe there'd been some sort of a falling out with tragic, unpremeditated consequences. This all had to be some sort of horrible accident! Didn't it?

I of course knew not to touch anything and that I should call the police immediately. What stopped me was Linda standing in the bedroom doorway with a strangely ecstatic expression on her face. "It's okay, daddy," she said in the manner of an adult reassuring a startled child; "you can have her now if you like. I've finished with her."