The Perfect Girl

TESSA

I’m standing just beside Philip Guerin when he and Zoe first come face to face, and my impression is that they might as well have the Grand Canyon between them because neither of them seems able to move at first, but when he finally opens his arms to her she gets up from the chair and runs into them, and the force with which she does that makes him gasp.

The first thing he says is, ‘Why is Zoe being interviewed without an adult present?’

The detectives stand up and the one on the left says, ‘We understood that Zoe is seventeen years old.’

‘It’s a grey area,’ says her father, ‘and you know that.’ He says this wearily, as if the knowledge he has about the rights of children in the legal system is something he doesn’t really care for, which is probably the case.

‘It’s perfectly acceptable,’ the detective holds his ground, ‘particularly as she’s not being charged, this is just an informal interview; and you are, sir?’

‘Her dad.’

Philip Guerin has aged since I last saw him, terribly. I heard from Maria that he hadn’t done well since the accident, that his elderly mother was turning up at the farmhouse to cook for him, and you can see that despair in the way the lines on his face have set, and his defeated posture, though that is, perhaps, also a result of the news he’s heard this morning.

In spite of that, I can’t help feeling a substantial twinge of resentment towards him because he abandoned my sister and Zoe, claiming that the outcome of their shared existence was too much for him. He absolved himself of blame, hurled accusations of hothousing Zoe at my sister, but I’d seen him do it too. I’d heard him use the full armoury of parental weapons to encourage her to play the piano: threats, copious amounts of praise when she’d done well and buckets of emotional blackmail – ‘You don’t want to let your teacher down, do you, or your mum? She’s given up so much so you can perform.’

The detective holds out his hand, says he’s sorry for Philip’s loss and they shake awkwardly, and introduce themselves formally, with Zoe’s body still sandwiched against her father.

‘I don’t want you to think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Mr Guerin,’ says the detective. ‘I understand that Zoe’s had previous experience in the justice system, but I want to reassure you that she’s not under suspicion at this time, and we’re just trying to get her account of what happened last night, so we can start to get to the bottom of it.’

And from her father’s chest, her voice distorted by his clothing, Zoe says, ‘I was asleep.’

Philip lifts his hands as if to say, There it is, she’s told you everything, but he doesn’t then clamp them around his daughter. As she clings to his chest with what I can only describe as ferocity, his arms simply drop to his side in a gesture that looks a whole lot like defeat, and I have a terrible feeling that he’s not going to be much help to Zoe at all.