فصل بیست و سوم

It will be no surprise to you, Mr. Wrexham, not if you’ve read the newspaper pieces.

Because you will have known right from the outset that the nanny arrested in the Elincourt case was not Rowan Caine but Rachel Gerhardt.

But to the police, it was like a bombshell. Or, no, not a bombshell. More like one of those exploding piñatas that showers you with gifts.

Because I had handed them their case on a plate.

Afterwards they focused very hard on how I managed to do it, as if I were some kind of criminal mastermind, who had plotted all this in exhaustive detail. But what they couldn’t seem to understand was how temptingly, laughably simple it had been. There had been no forgery, no elaborate identity theft or manufactured papers. How did you obtain the fake identity papers, Rachel? they kept asking, but the truth was, there had been no fake papers. All I had done was pick up my friend Rowan’s nannying paperwork from her bedroom in our shared flat, and show it to Sandra. Background check, first aid certificate, CV, none of it had any photographs. There was absolutely no need for me to fake anything, and no way of Sandra knowing that the woman standing in front of her was not the person named on the certificates she was holding out.

And, I tried to tell myself, it wasn’t much of a deception. After all, I really did have those credentials—most of them, anyway. I had a background check and a first aid certificate. Like Rowan, I had worked in the baby room at Little Nippers, albeit not quite as long as she had, and not as supervisor. And I had done nannying beforehand, though not as much, and I wasn’t sure that my references would have been quite as gushing. But the basics were all there. The name thing was just a . . . technicality. I even had a clean driving license, just as I had told Sandra. The only problem was that I couldn’t show it to her because of the photo. But everything I had told her—every qualification I had claimed—it was all true.

Everything except for my name.

There was luck involved of course too. It had been lucky that Sandra had agreed to my request and hadn’t contacted Little Nippers themselves for a reference. If she had, they would have told her that Rowan Caine had left a couple of months back. Lucky that she never pushed me on the driving license.

And it had been lucky too that she used a remote payroll service, so that I never had to present Rowan’s passport in person and could simply forward the scan she had left on her computer desktop along with our shared bills.

The biggest piece of good fortune was that banks, slightly incredibly, didn’t seem to care whose name was on a bank transfer, as long as the account number and sort code matched up. That had been something I’d never expected. I had lain awake wondering how to figure that part out. Claim that my account was in a different name? Ask for cash, or checks made out to R. Gerhardt and cross my fingers Sandra didn’t ask why? I’d practically laughed when I found out that none of that mattered, that if you paid by transfer you could put Donald Duck in the payee box, and it would go through. It seemed unbelievably careless.

But the truth was, to begin with, I hadn’t even looked past that first stage. All I had focused on was getting that interview, standing in Heatherbrae House, looking Sandra and Bill in the eye. That was all I had wanted. That was the only reason I had answered the ad. And yet somehow, the opportunities had kept presenting themselves, like temptingly wrapped gifts on a plate, begging me to pick them up and make them mine.

I shouldn’t have done it, I know that now, Mr. Wrexham. But can’t you see—can’t you see what it must have been like?

Now, standing in the kitchen with Rhiannon laughing in my face, I felt a great wave of panic break over me, followed by a strange sense of something else—almost of relief, as if I had known this moment was coming, and was relieved to have it over and done with.

For a moment I thought about bluffing, asking her what she meant, pretending I had never heard the name Rachel Gerhardt. But only for a moment. If she had got far enough to discover my real name, she was not going to be thrown off the scent by an indignant denial.

“How did you find out?” I asked instead.

“Because, unlike my dear parents, I bother to do a little digging when a new girl turns up out of the blue. You’d be surprised what you can find out online. They teach it in school now, you know, managing your digital footprint. I guess they didn’t do that in your day?” The barb was palpable, but I didn’t bother to respond. It scarcely seemed important. What mattered was how far she had dug, and why—and what exactly she had found out.

“It didn’t take me long to track down Rowan Caine,” Rhiannon was saying. “She’s pretty boring isn’t she? Not much ammunition.” Ammunition. So that was what this was about. Rhiannon had been digging around online for any little indiscretion she could use as leverage. Only she had stumbled on something much, much bigger.

“I couldn’t understand it,” she said, a little smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “It all matched up—the name, the date of birth, the time at that nursery with the stupid twee name—Little Nippers,” she said mockingly. “Ugh. But then suddenly there were all these pictures from Thailand and Vietnam. And when I saw you on the driveway, I began to think I’d fucked up, that maybe I did have the wrong person. It took me a few hours to track down the real you. Must be losing my touch. Shame for you she doesn’t keep her friend list private. Or that you didn’t bother to delete your Facebook profile.” Fuck. So it had been as simple as that. As simple as scrolling down a list of Rowan’s Facebook friends and picking out the face I had so obligingly posted up for all the world to see. How could I have been so stupid? But truthfully, it had never occurred to me that anyone would join the dots so assiduously. And I hadn’t been setting out to deceive, that’s the thing. That’s what I tried to explain to the police. If I had really been setting up a fraudulent second life, wouldn’t I have bothered to cover my tracks?

Because this wasn’t fraud, not really. Not in the way the police meant. It was . . . it was just an accident, really. The equivalent of borrowing your friend’s car while they’re away. I never meant for all this to happen.

The problem was, the thing I couldn’t tell the police, was why I had come to Heatherbrae under an assumed name. They kept asking me and asking me and digging and digging, and I kept floundering, and trying to come up with reasons—things like, Rowan’s references were better than mine (which was true) and she had more experience than me (true again). I think at first they thought I must have some deep, dark professional secret—a lapsed registration, or a conviction as a sex offender or something. And of course none of that was the case, and as hard as they tried to find something, there was nothing wrong with my own papers.

It looked very, very bad for me, I knew that, even at the time. But I kept telling myself, if Rhiannon hadn’t discovered why I had come here, then perhaps the police wouldn’t either.

But that was stupid, of course. They are the police. It’s their job to dig.

It took them some time. Days, maybe even weeks, I can’t totally remember. The interrogation starts to run together after a while, the days blurring into one another, as they picked and picked and prodded and probed. But eventually they came into the room holding a piece of paper and they were smiling like Cheshire cats, while simultaneously somehow trying to look grave and professional.

And I knew. I knew that they knew.

And I knew that I was sunk.

But that was afterwards. And I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have to tell the other part. The hardest part. The part I can’t quite believe even now.

And the part I can’t fully explain, even to myself.

I have to tell you about that night.