It Could Have Been Her(78)

When I came back in a few minutes later, Annie was on her hands and knees in the study, pulling papers out of drawers. “What did she mean,” she barked at me, “?‘more than a bag of strings’—what did she mean by that?”

“What are you looking for, Annie?”

She looked at me frantically. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. I just… what did she mean by that?”

“I guess we’ll find out when she comes with the warrant tomorrow.”

“But she can’t possibly. I mean, this is insane. What on earth are they looking for?”

I sighed and smiled. “The same thing you’re looking for, I suppose.”

“Which is what?”

“I have no idea. You tell me, Annie? I’ve always known there was something suspect about this house. About your setup. And now,” I said calmly, “maybe I’m about to find out exactly what it is.”





chapter sixty-one


So,” says Jane, now staring wide-eyed at Stuart. “What happened?”

Stuart places his pint glass on the coaster in front of him and leans back. “Well,” he says. “DI Brooks got her warrant and they came back the next day. Four cars parked outside our house, neighbors’ eyes on stalks. The works. They were there for four hours. Annie’s lawyer was present. They found nothing. Literally nothing. The DI’s face was a picture. She was devastated, you could tell; she’d been one hundred percent convinced she’d nailed it. She’d thought they’d be digging bodies out of the back garden. But no: cops back in their cars, DI’s paperwork back in a drawer, that was that. But still, I knew. I knew they’d missed something. After that I was on a mission, a total fucking mission, to find whatever the police had missed.”

“And? Did you?”

Stuart puts his hand around his pint glass and caresses it thoughtfully. “Listen,” he says. “I promised Daisy I’d protect her, always, and I don’t know you two from Adam. I get a good feeling about you both, I really do—I’m sure your intentions are sound—but I’m really not sure I want to talk much more about all of this.”

“I’m here for the same reasons you are, Stuart. I’m here to protect Daisy. We want the same thing.”

“I hear you. I know. But in protecting Daisy, we might just lob a grenade into the middle of everything.”

“With all due respect, Stuart, I’m not sure what could actually be worse than Daisy being abused by a pervert dressed up as a clown. Annie and Jessamine are grown women. Whatever secrets they’re hiding, they’ve been hiding them for a long time. Maybe it’s time for it to happen? For the sake of Claire’s family?”

“But I don’t know anything about Claire Connolly,” Stuart protests. “As far as I’m aware, she never entered the property.”

Jane throws Stuart a pointed look. “But you think she did?”

He sighs heavily. “I really don’t know.”

Janes pauses for a moment and then says, “I’ve been in your house. Thornwood. I’ve been there.”

Stuart throws her a questioning look.

“About twenty-five years ago. I was picked up in Soho by a man who I now know to be Allen Black. He was very charming, very attentive, very handsome. We had a few drinks and then he brought me to his house to talk about a potential ‘job.’?” She makes quotes with her fingers and sighs. “Anyway. We got there, to Thornwood, and I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake, that there was something horribly off. His wife was there, and I could tell she did not want me in her house. Allen made me a drink and as he passed it to me there was a bang and a scream from upstairs that made me jump and I accidentally knocked the drink from Allen’s hand. The atmosphere turned really weird then and when I looked at him, in that moment I just knew, without a shadow of doubt, that that drink had been meant to knock me out. I made my excuses and I left and ever since then I felt like that was one of my nine lives, you know? We all have them. Especially when we’re young. I always felt that I had dodged something that night. Something terrible. So you can imagine how it makes me feel to know that a young woman not that much younger than I was then went missing outside that house only five years later.”

There is a taut silence when Jane finishes talking; then Stuart looks at her with pain in his eyes and says, “Fuck.” And then he says, “All I know is that after the DI and her team left, I felt really unsettled. I knew that they’d missed something. So I started looking. Every night when Jessamine, Annie, and Daisy were sleeping, I’d come down. I went through everything. I knew that Annie must have hidden something that day before the cops arrived. I stayed up late into the night. And then, yeah, finally, I found something.”

“What was it?”

“It was a photo. Of a girl.”





chapter sixty-two


STUART, SIX YEARS EARLIER

On the third day of searching the house I found an empty packet of photos. I was about to return it to the drawer in the laundry room where I’d found it but then I noticed three strips of negatives tucked into its front pocket. I held them to the light but could barely make out what I was looking at, so I took them to Snappy Snaps in the village, the one that George Michael once drove his car into when he was off his face on skunk, and I paid for the one-hour service.