Part one

“Bonne nuit, maman.”

She whispered it in French. With a perfect accent. Under the duvet, her mouth pressed against a little pink walkie-talkie.

It was nine o’clock on the dot. I was on the landing with a pile of clean washing in my arms, outside her half-open bedroom door. And Poppy’s mother was in the next room, on the sofa in the lounge, watching a cookery programme.

Poppy is six. She doesn’t speak a word of French. That’s what I had been told.

From the walkie-talkie came two short, sharp sounds. Click, click. Then nothing.

Poppy slid the handset under her pillow, turned to face the wall and fell asleep the way you switch off a lamp.

I stayed out on the landing with my towels. Those two clicks weren’t a toy noise. Someone had pressed a button.

Someone, somewhere, had heard her.

I should explain what I was doing there.

I’m twenty-three, I have an English degree from the University of Lille and no idea what I want to do with my life. So, this autumn, I left for a year in London as an au pair. A hundred and twenty pounds a week, a room in the attic, English classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and Poppy every afternoon.

The Ashworths live in a Victorian house in Clapham, on a quiet street behind Abbeville Road, with bottle-green front doors and bikes chained to the railings. Julian, the father, works for a bank in the City. He leaves at seven, gets home at eight and talks to his daughter as if she were an important client. Harriet, his wife, is blonde, polite, tired. She works three days a week for an architect in Battersea. On the first evening, as she showed me my room, she said:

“Poppy isn’t my biological daughter, but she is my daughter. She calls me Mummy. Her mother left when she was a baby.”

And Julian, the same evening, with a smile that never reached his eyes:

“Just one rule, Inès. With Poppy, you speak English. Only English. She gets confused if we mix them.”

I thought it was odd, a family hiring a French au pair and then banning French. But I had been in London for three days, I needed the job, and I said, “Of course.”

The next day, I waited until Poppy was at school to lift up her pillow.

The walkie-talkie was there. A candy-pink toy, with a bendy aerial and a half-peeled unicorn sticker. The kind they sell in pairs, so two children can talk from one bedroom to another. It was set to channel 7. I switched it on. There was nothing but static.

Poppy has no brothers or sisters. No friends on the street. So who was she talking to?

That evening, at nine, I stationed myself on the landing. “Bonne nuit, maman.” Click, click. Two nights later, too. Every night, to the minute. Never another word, never a voice. Just those two clicks, like someone pressing twice to say: I’m here.

In the end, I asked her one afternoon, on a swing on Clapham Common.

“Who do you talk to at night?”

She braked with her trainers in the sand. She looked at me with very serious eyes.

“It’s a secret. If I tell, she’ll stop.”

“Who’s she?”

Poppy swung off again, very high, and didn’t say another word.

On the way home, I did something I wasn’t allowed to do. Outside the bakery window, without looking at her, I asked her in French:

“Do you want a pain au chocolat?”

“Yes, with the…”

She stopped dead. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, as if she had broken something precious.

“I don’t speak French,” she said in English, very fast. “Daddy says I don’t speak French. Don’t tell him. Please, please don’t tell him.”

I bought her the pain au chocolat. She ate it in silence, holding my hand very tight.

I was frightened. Not of a ghost. Of something worse. You read things, when you look after children. Adults who give presents, who ask for secrecy, who wait for night.

A children’s walkie-talkie has a range of a few hundred metres at most. Whoever was listening was very close.

I began to look at the street differently. The house opposite, number 14, had been to let all spring. Since the summer, somebody had been living there. I had never seen anyone go in or out. But in the evenings, in the first-floor window, directly opposite Poppy’s room, a lamp stayed on. And one morning, as we left for school, I saw the curtain move. The outline of a woman, dark hair, who drew back too quickly.

The same day, in Poppy’s school bag, I found a drawing. A house, a sun, and a lady with long black hair and a red dress. Above it, in clumsy letters: “MAMAN”. Not “MUMMY”. Harriet is blonde. Harriet never wears red.

I very nearly told Harriet everything. Then, one evening, I heard Julian on the phone in his study, the door not quite shut. He was speaking low and fast, in a voice I didn’t recognise.

“No. Thursday. One way. Neither the school nor the au pair can know. Dubai, yes. We’re not coming back.”

The next day, there were two new suitcases in the hall cupboard. A big black one. And a little pink one, with unicorns.

In the little one were already her starry pyjamas, her wellies and the picture book she made me read to her every night. There were three nights left until Thursday. And I no longer knew whom I was afraid of for her: the woman across the street, or her own father.

On Tuesday night, I decided to listen to the end.

At 8:58, I was sitting on the landing floor with my back to the wall, Poppy’s door open ten centimetres. Harriet was watching TV. Julian wasn’t home yet.

Nine o’clock. The rustle of the duvet. The little click of the button.

“Bonne nuit, maman.”

But instead of turning to the wall, Poppy pressed a second time. Her voice was trembling.

“Daddy says we’re going on the plane. Thursday. He says it’s very far away and it’s for ever.”

A silence. The hiss of the walkie-talkie.

And the voice answered. In French.